The FeatherTableBuilder
class
can read files in Feather format.
Feather is a column-oriented binary disk-based format
based on Apache Arrow and supported by (at least) Python, R and Julia.
Some description of it is available at
https://github.com/wesm/feather and
https://blog.rstudio.com/2016/03/29/feather/.
It can be used for large datasets, but it does not support
array-valued columns.
It can be a useful format to use for exchanging data with R,
for which FITS I/O is reported to be slow.
At present CATEGORY type columns are not supported, and metadata associated with TIME, DATE and TIMESTAMP columns is not retrieved.
The feather reader can only read files that are on disk, not streamed.