Apache Arrow Flight is a high-performance data transport framework built on Apache Arrow and gRPC that streams columnar data across networks without serialization/deserialization overhead. A practical walkthrough builds a Flight server on top of a Delta Lake table (using Divvy bike trip data) and a Python client to consume it. The server implements three core RPC methods — list_flights, get_flight_info, and do_get — and uses the Ticket abstraction to identify datasets. The post concludes that Arrow Flight is primarily a tool for building custom data transport layers and high-performance data applications, not a day-to-day data team utility.
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