I'm super excited to be involved in the new open source Apache Arrow community initiative. For Python (and R, too!), it will help enable

• Substantially improved data access speeds
• Closer to native performance Python extensions for big data systems like Apache Spark
• New in-memory analytics functionality for nested / JSON-like data

There's plenty of places you can learn more about Arrow, but this post is about how it's specifically relevant to pandas users. See, for example:

• "Python and Hadoop: A State of the Union"
• "Introducing Apache Arrow: A Fast, Interoperable In-Memory Columnar Data Structure Standard"
• "Introducing Apache Arrow: Columnar In-Memory Analytics"