ARROW-6041: [Website] Blog post announcing R library availability on CRAN

r/README.Rmd

@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ install.packages("arrow")
 > `install.packages("arrow", type = "source")`. We hope to have this resolved
 > in the next release.
 
-On macOS and Windows, installing a binary package from CRAN will handle Arrow's C++ dependencies for you. On Linux, you'll need to first install the C++ library. See the [Arrow project installation page](https://arrow.apache.org/install/) to find pre-compiled binary packages for some common Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS. You'll need to install `libparquet-dev` on Debian and Ubuntu, or `parquet-devel` on CentOS. This will also automatically install the Arrow C++ library as a dependency.
+On macOS and Windows, installing a binary package from CRAN will handle Arrow's C++ dependencies for you. On Linux, you'll need to first install the C++ library. See the [Arrow project installation page](https://arrow.apache.org/install/) to find pre-compiled binary packages for some common Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS. You'll need to install `libparquet-dev` on Debian and Ubuntu, or `parquet-devel` on CentOS. This will also automatically install the Arrow C++ library as a dependency. Other Linux distributions must install the C++ library from source.
 
 If you install the `arrow` package from source and the C++ library is not found, the R package functions will notify you that Arrow is not available. Call
 

site/README.md

@@ -47,6 +47,13 @@ such cases the following configuration option may help:
 bundle config build.nokogiri --use-system-libraries
 ```
 
+`nokogiri` depends on the `libxml2` and `libxslt1` libraries, which can be
+installed on Debian-like systems with
+
+```
+apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev
+```
+
 If you are planning to publish the website, you must clone the arrow-site git
 repository. Run this command from the `site` directory so that `asf-site` is a
 subdirectory of `site`.

site/_data/contributors.yml

@@ -46,4 +46,7 @@
  apacheId: agrove
  githubId: andygrove
  role: PMC
+- name: Neal Richardson
+ apacheId: npr # Not a real apacheId
+ githubId: nealrichardson
 # End contributors.yml

site/_posts/2019-08-01-r-package-on-cran.md

@@ -0,0 +1,173 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Apache Arrow R Package On CRAN"
+date: "2019-08-08 06:00:00 -0600"
+author: npr
+categories: [application]
+---
+<!--
+{% comment %}
+Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
+contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
+this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
+The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0
+(the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
+the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
+
+http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+
+Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
+WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
+See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
+limitations under the License.
+{% endcomment %}
+-->
+
+We are very excited to announce that the `arrow` R package is now available on
+[CRAN](https://cran.r-project.org/).
+
+[Apache Arrow](https://arrow.apache.org/) is a cross-language development
+platform for in-memory data that specifies a standardized columnar memory
+format for flat and hierarchical data, organized for efficient analytic
+operations on modern hardware. The `arrow` package provides an R interface to
+the Arrow C++ library, including support for working with Parquet and Feather
+files, as well as lower-level access to Arrow memory and messages.
+
+You can install the package from CRAN with
+
+```r
+install.packages("arrow")
+```
+
+On macOS and Windows, installing a binary package from CRAN will generally
+handle Arrow's C++ dependencies for you. However, the macOS CRAN binaries are
+unfortunately incomplete for this version, so to install 0.14.1, you'll first
+need to use Homebrew to get the Arrow C++ library (`brew install
+apache-arrow`), and then from R you can `install.packages("arrow", type =
+"source")`.
+
+Windows binaries are not yet available on CRAN but should be published soon.
+
+On Linux, you'll need to first install the C++ library. See the [Arrow project
+installation page](https://arrow.apache.org/install/) to find pre-compiled
+binary packages for some common Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu,
+and CentOS. You'll need to install `libparquet-dev` on Debian and Ubuntu, or
+`parquet-devel` on CentOS. This will also automatically install the Arrow C++
+library as a dependency. Other Linux distributions must install the C++ library
+from source.
+
+If you install the `arrow` R package from source and the C++ library is not
+found, the R package functions will notify you that Arrow is not
+available. Call
+
+```r
+arrow::install_arrow()
+```
+
+for version- and platform-specific guidance on installing the Arrow C++
+library.
+
+## Parquet files
+
+This release introduces basic read and write support for the [Apache
+Parquet](https://parquet.apache.org/) columnar data file format. Prior to this
+release, options for accessing Parquet data in R were limited; the most common
+recommendation was to use Apache Spark. The `arrow` package greatly simplifies
+this access and lets you go from a Parquet file to a `data.frame` and back
+easily, without having to set up a database.
+
+```r
+library(arrow)
+df <- read_parquet("path/to/file.parquet")
+```
+
+This function, along with the other readers in the package, takes an optional
+`col_select` argument, inspired by the
+[`vroom`](https://vroom.r-lib.org/reference/vroom.html) package. This argument
+lets you use the ["tidyselect" helper
+functions](https://tidyselect.r-lib.org/reference/select_helpers.html), as you
+can do in `dplyr::select()`, to specify that you only want to keep certain
+columns. By narrowing your selection at read time, you can load a `data.frame`
+with less memory overhead.
+
+For example, suppose you had written the `iris` dataset to Parquet. You could
+read a `data.frame` with only the columns `c("Sepal.Length", "Sepal.Width")` by
+doing
+
+```r
+df <- read_parquet("iris.parquet", col_select = starts_with("Sepal"))
+```
+
+Just as you can read, you can write Parquet files:
+
+```r
+write_parquet(df, "path/to/different_file.parquet")
+```
+
+Note that this read and write support for Parquet files in R is in its early
+stages of development. The Python Arrow library
+([pyarrow](https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/)) still has much richer
+support for Parquet files, including working with multi-file datasets. We
+intend to reach feature equivalency between the R and Python packages in the
+future.
+
+## Feather files
+
+This release also includes a faster and more robust implementation of the
+Feather file format, providing `read_feather()` and
+`write_feather()`. [Feather](https:/wesm/feather) was one of the
+initial applications of Apache Arrow for Python and R, providing an efficient,
+common file format language-agnostic data frame storage, along with
+implementations in R and Python.
+
+As Arrow progressed, development of Feather moved to the
+[`apache/arrow`](https:/apache/arrow) project, and for the last two
+years, the Python implementation of Feather has just been a wrapper around
+`pyarrow`. This meant that as Arrow progressed and bugs were fixed, the Python
+version of Feather got the improvements but sadly R did not.
+
+With this release, the R implementation of Feather catches up and now depends
+on the same underlying C++ library as the Python version does. This should
+result in more reliable and consistent behavior across the two languages, as
+well as [improved
+performance](https://wesmckinney.com/blog/feather-arrow-future/).
+
+We encourage all R users of `feather` to switch to using
+`arrow::read_feather()` and `arrow::write_feather()`.
+
+Note that both Feather and Parquet are columnar data formats that allow sharing
+data frames across R, Pandas, and other tools. When should you use Feather and
+when should you use Parquet? Parquet balances space-efficiency with
+deserialization costs, making it an ideal choice for remote storage systems
+like HDFS or Amazon S3. Feather is designed for fast local reads, particularly
+with solid-state drives, and is not intended for use with remote storage
+systems. Feather files can be memory-mapped and accessed as Arrow columnar data
+in-memory without any deserialization while Parquet files always must be
+decompressed and decoded. See the [Arrow project
+FAQ](https://arrow.apache.org/faq/) for more.
+
+## Other capabilities
+
+In addition to these readers and writers, the `arrow` package has wrappers for
+other readers in the C++ library; see `?read_csv_arrow` and
+`?read_json_arrow`. These readers are being developed to optimize for the
+memory layout of the Arrow columnar format and are not intended as a direct
+replacement for existing R CSV readers (`base::read.csv`, `readr::read_csv`,
+`data.table::fread`) that return an R `data.frame`.
+
+It also provides many lower-level bindings to the C++ library, which enable you
+to access and manipulate Arrow objects. You can use these to build connectors
+to other applications and services that use Arrow. One example is Spark: the
+[`sparklyr`](https://spark.rstudio.com/) package has support for using Arrow to
+move data to and from Spark, yielding [significant performance
+gains](http://arrow.apache.org/blog/2019/01/25/r-spark-improvements/).
+
+## Acknowledgements
+
+In addition to the work on wiring the R package up to the Arrow Parquet C++
+library, a lot of effort went into building and packaging Arrow for R users,
+ensuring its ease of installation across platforms. We'd like to thank the
+support of Jeroen Ooms, Javier Luraschi, JJ Allaire, Davis Vaughan, the CRAN
+team, and many others in the Apache Arrow community for helping us get to this
+point.