Convert Arrow to TSV

Apache Arrow (.arrow) is a format that was designed for storing tabular data in memory (RAM). It was not designed for storing data as files on disk.

Arrow enforces a schema. Which means that every value in a column must have the same value.

Arrow was designed to work well between different data analysis systems without needing to be serialised or deserialized.

Arrow is a binary data format, which means that it can be easily read by computers. But it cannot be read by people. The easiest way to view arrow data is to convert it to CSV first.

It can be best to convert Arrow data to Parquet before saving to disk. Arrow was not designed for storing data to disk, so can be inefficient and slow to query.

TSV (Tab Separated Values) files are the same as CSV files, except values in a row are separated by a tab.

Values within a row are separated by tabs. Rows are separated by newlines.

TSV files often start with a header row that has column names, but this is not required.

Each row in a TSV file mush have the same number of values as the header row.

TSV files do not enforce types or a schema. This means that each column can have multiple types, which can make analysis difficult and compression inefficient.

Parquet files can be easier to analyze and compress better than TSV files.