Feather File Format¶
Feather is a portable file format for storing Arrow tables or data frames (from languages like Python or R) that utilizes the Arrow IPC format internally. Feather was created early in the Arrow project as a proof of concept for fast, language-agnostic data frame storage for Python (pandas) and R. There are two file format versions for Feather:
Version 2 (V2), the default version, which is exactly represented as the Arrow IPC file format on disk. V2 files support storing all Arrow data types as well as compression with LZ4 or ZSTD. V2 was first made available in Apache Arrow 0.17.0.
Version 1 (V1), a legacy version available starting in 2016, replaced by V2. V1 files are distinct from Arrow IPC files and lack many features, such as the ability to store all Arrow data types. V1 files also lack compression support. We intend to maintain read support for V1 for the foreseeable future.
The pyarrow.feather module contains the read and write functions for the format. write_feather() accepts either a Table or pandas.DataFrame object:
