Apache Arrow 21 Released
Written by Kay Ewbank   
Monday, 07 July 2025

Version 21 of Apache Arrow has been released, including the first official Swift implementation of the platform. Improvements to Arrow 21 include exposing gRPC in the Flight client builder and improvements to Avro read consumers. The Swift implementation has been under development for a couple of years now. 

Apache Arrow is a development platform for in-memory analytics. It has technologies that enable big data systems to process and move data quickly. Arrow is language independent, can be used for flat and hierarchical data, and the data store is organized for efficient analytic operations. It also provides computational libraries. Swift now joins the languages already supported, including C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Julia, MATLAB, Python, R, Ruby, and Rust.

arrow

The Arrow project libraries provide the tools for solving problems related to data transfer and in-memory analytical processing. This includes such topics as zero-copy shared memory and RPC-based data movement; reading and writing file formats (like CSV, Apache ORC, and Apache Parquet); and in-memory analytics and query processing.

The improvements to the new versions, including for Swift and Java, start with gRPC functionality in the Flight client builder. This provides more control over the gRPC layer that is used for communication in Apache Arrow Flight.

The Avro read consumers have also been improved to provide  better performance and reliability, and Flight SQL has also been improved. This release includes the ability to return column remarks in CommandGetTables and clarifications to the specification regarding prepared statements and bound parameters.

Flight SQL can now return column remarks in CommandGetTables and the developers have tightened up the specification to better handle prepared statements and bound parameters.

The JDBC driver for Flight SQL has been updated and now supports mTLS authentication and bind parameters. It also handles metadata and data connections better. Flight RPC metadata can also now be retrieved by applications from the JDBC driver.

The R package has also been improved. It now supports the Feather V2 format and the C Data Interface, along with low-level bindings for the C interface and tooling to work with Arrow data in Python using reticulate.

Apache Arrow Swift 21 is available now.  

arrow

More Information

Apache Arrow Website

Related Articles

Apache Arrow 15 Stabilizes Flight SQL

Apache Arrow Improves C++ Support

Apache Arrow 5 Improves Asynchronous Scanner

Apache Arrow 4 Adds New C++ Compute Functions

Apache Arrow Improves C++ Support

Apache Arrow 2 Improves C++ and Rust Support

Apache Arrow Reaches 1.0

Banner


Perl 5.42 Released - Still Going Strong
09/07/2025

Just hot out of the oven, there's a new minor version release of the venerable programming language that is Perl.



Rust 1.88 Adds Naked Function Support
30/06/2025

Rust 1.88 has been released with support for naked functions and for Let chains. In addtion, from now on, Cargo will automatically run garbage collection on the cache in its home directory.


More News

pico book

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info