Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Support opening datasets with file-like objects in a Beam pipeline

Open
#37 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
32/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python

Research direction

Start by examining how xarray-beam opens datasets and passes them into an Apache Beam pipeline. Reproduce the failure with a dataset opened from a file-like object, then determine what changes are needed in xarray-beam or upstream Xarray; done means netCDF loading works in separate Beam workers.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I experimented a bit more with this based on @mjwillson's suggestion.

Amazingly, it seems that uses file-like objects in Xarray does actually work as used here, though making a local copy might still have better performance.

What doesn't work yet -- but hopefully with small upstream changes to Xarray could work -- is passing xarray datasets opened with these file-like objects into a Beam pipeilne. That could let us do the actual data loading from netCDF in separate workers, which could be quite a win!

Originally posted by @shoyer in https://github.com/google/xarray-beam/pull/31#discussion_r696246752

Dominant language
Python
Stars
170
Forks
15
Avg merge
18h 27m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from google/xarray-beam

All issues in google/xarray-beam

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.