"Arrow Flight SQL: High-Speed Data Transport for Analytics Apps"
Arrow Flight SQL is redefining how analytics applications move data: fewer copies, lower latency, and predictable streaming at scale. This book is written for experienced engineers building BI tools, data platforms, and high-throughput services who are tired of opaque drivers and ad hoc wire formats—and want a precise mental model of what happens on the network, in memory, and across languages.
You'll learn Flight SQL as a protocol layered on Arrow Flight: the plan/locate-then-stream interaction pattern, command families for queries and updates, prepared statement lifecycles, and standardized catalog/metadata result sets. The book drills into Arrow columnar mechanics—schemas, type mapping, record batch boundaries, and buffer ownership—then connects them to real gRPC transport behavior: flow control, cancellations, deadlines, tuning, and concurrency. Production chapters cover TLS/mTLS, authentication and authorization, capability negotiation via SqlInfo, and an actionable error/observability model for streaming systems. You'll come away able to design robust clients, implement interoperable servers on top of existing SQL engines, and build compatibility/performance test matrices that survive version drift.
Prerequisites: comfort with SQL engines, gRPC-style RPC systems, and performance debugging. The focus is deep interoperability, correctness under load, and operational discipline—not introductory API walkthroughs.
