Apache Arrow Flight explained: a developer's guide to fast columnar data transport

Apache Arrow Flight is a high-performance data transport framework built on Apache Arrow and gRPC that moves large columnar datasets across networks without the serialization and deserialization bottlenecks of JDBC, ODBC, or REST. It departs from traditional coordinator-based architectures by using multiple endpoints to parallelize data transfer, streaming Arrow RecordBatches directly to clients in their native format. The article explains Flight’s core client-server concepts and walks through a practical Python implementation that serves a Delta Lake table over the network without requiring Spark.