want to be able to serve responses as Apache Arrow data

[gregorywaynepower]

Problem

I have stakeholders who want to be able to receive responses to HTTP requests as Arrow IPC streams.

Solution

There's an implementation of HTTP methods for sharing Arrow data. Postgres was one of the first databases to have an Arrow Flight SQL implementation.

[wolfgangwalther]

It would probably help to explain what that is and why PostgREST, the project, would benefit from it.

[gregorywaynepower]

For Apache Arrow, it's an in-memory columnar data standard that is geared towards analytical workloads. Here's the one-pager overview. I find that users of my data are looking to do their own analytics, serving Arrow data would mean that they could do analysis without having to convert from JSON to another format.

[wolfgangwalther]

So you want to return a different format instead of JSON?

Have a look at https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v12/references/api/media_type_handlers.html - does that help?

[gregorywaynepower]

Yes it does! It helps that Arrow does have their own MIME types application/vnd.apache.arrow.stream and application/vnd.apache.arrow.file.

[wolfgangwalther]

Feel free to share your solution once you have it working, this could possibly be added as a How-To / Integration in the docs.