February 12, 2026
Cupid’s Arrow hits data nerds
Apache Arrow is 10 years old
10 candles, petabytes of opinions: fans cheer, newbies Google Arrow
TLDR: Apache Arrow, a common way to share column-based data between apps, turns 10. The crowd mixes newbies asking if it's like SQLite, veterans reminiscing about Feather, and power users bragging about terabytes, debating Arrow vs Parquet and why read/write speed matters when data gets massive.
Apache Arrow just turned 10, and the comments section threw a birthday bash with equal parts confusion and chest‑thumping. One newcomer admitted, “I had to look up what Arrow actually does,” sparking a mini‑debate comparing it to SQLite (spoiler: Arrow isn’t a database). Meanwhile veterans got misty‑eyed, reminiscing about the scrappy “Feather” days that grew into the Arrow juggernaut—complete with memes about “unhinged PowerPoint topic modeling.”
Fans loved the official flex that there’s been only one breaking change in a decade, crowning Arrow the stability king. Enterprise folks rolled in to brag: one commenter said they process terabytes of financial time series and the performance is “so good.” Pragmatists chimed in with a reality check: optimizing how data is saved and loaded isn’t “trivial” when you’re moving petabytes—it’s the bottleneck. Cue a spirited explainer for the curious: Arrow is an in‑memory, column‑based standard for moving data between tools; Parquet is for storing data on disk; Feather is a quick, Arrow‑powered file format for fast exchange.
The community also side‑eyed the old note about early cross‑language tests: “we assume the tests passed,” which became an inside joke. Overall, the vibe was part birthday cake, part hackathon: rookies Googling, old‑timers telling war stories, and pros plotting benchmarks to prove whose data pipeline really flies with Arrow.
Key Points
- •Apache Arrow marks its 10-year anniversary, with the project established and first commit on February 5, 2016.
- •Arrow 0.1.0 was released on October 7, 2016, including core data types defined in a FlatBuffers schema.
- •The columnar format remained largely stable, with only one breaking change: removal of top-level validity bitmaps for Union types.
- •The IPC format saw minor framing/metadata updates tracked by MetadataVersion to maintain backward compatibility, with one breaking change aligned to Union validity.
- •Cross-language integration tests began in November 2016 and have since ensured backward compatibility, using data generated in 2019 (Arrow 0.14.1) across implementations.