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[JS] Improve JS documentation on how to read/deserialize arrow data

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#78 3 comments 9 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the Apache Arrow JS README and compare its current guidance with the DuckDB Wasm and Observable examples linked in the issue. Define a focused documentation scope for reading, serialization, row/column conversion, nested types, and casting before consolidating examples. Done means the README gives a clear, unified path for reading and manipulating Arrow data in JavaScript.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Type: enhancement
Describe the enhancement requested

cc @domoritz

Current JS documentation is not clear on how to read & manipulate the data from Apache Arrow JS

JS version of Apache Arrow is used in JS environment (DuckDB Wasm, ObservableHQ, Arquero)
and people are asking on how to properly read the data, but there is no clear answer
https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-wasm/pull/1418

There is some documentation to read arrow data or deserialize to JSON
https://duckdb.org/docs/api/wasm/query.html#arrow-table-to-json
https://observablehq.com/@theneuralbit/using-apache-arrow-js-with-large-datasets

but this examples should be unified to the original Apache Arrow JS documentation
https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/main/js/README.md

Some ideas of code example to provide to the documentation:

  • Best way to read data without deserialize into JSON version
  • Explain how to take advantage of JS Proxy to read data faster instead of deserialize to JSON
  • If serialization is required, how to do it properly
  • How to convert column to row
  • How to read nested type (STRUCT, MAP, DICTIONNARY...)
  • How to cast arrow type (from DECIMAL to DOUBLE)
  • How to cast arrow type (LONG, DOUBLE, DECIMAL) to desired js type (bigint, number, string...)
Component(s)

Documentation, JavaScript

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
112
Forks
23
Avg merge
17h 55m
Merged PRs (30d)
10

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