Some systems may wish to send 32- or 64-bit decimal values on the wire without any conversions. Computations engines using Arrow may choose to promote these to 128-bit right away on receipt, but it would be useful to be enable systems with native handling of the smaller-size types to be able to send data via Arrow streams / IPC without extra serialization
Robert Fox:
+1 to optimize decimal storage. I use decimal a lot to store monetary values (no tolerance for lost precision). All of my arrow files/streams are huge! I end up using compression more than I would like.
Some systems may wish to send 32- or 64-bit decimal values on the wire without any conversions. Computations engines using Arrow may choose to promote these to 128-bit right away on receipt, but it would be useful to be enable systems with native handling of the smaller-size types to be able to send data via Arrow streams / IPC without extra serialization
Reporter: Wes McKinney / @wesm
Note: This issue was originally created as ARROW-2009. Please see the migration documentation for further details.