Specifies whether to use the Arrow format with BigQuery's Storage API.

Data Type

bool

Default Value

false

Remarks

This property only has an effect when RSBGoogleBigQuery_p_UseStorageAPI is enabled. When performing reads against the Storage API, the driver can request data in different formats. By default it uses Avro but enabling this option makes it use Arrow.

This option should be enabled when working with time series data or other datasets that have many date, time, datetime or timestamp fields. For these datasets using Arrow can have noticeable improvements over using Avro. Additionally, as Avro cannot process special characters in column names, the Arrow format should be used in this case. Otherwise Avro and Arrow read times are very close and switching between them is unlikely to make a significant difference.