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[Variant] Support BinaryArray/LargeBinaryArray in addition to BinaryViewArray for Variant #8387
Description
Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge? Please describe what you are trying to do.
Describe the solution you'd like
Currently VariantArray requires BinaryViewArray but by default the Parquet reader produces BinaryArray -- this means that without a workaround, it is not possible to read data from the ParquetReader without converting
According to the Arrow canonical extension type (see apache/arrow#47456) BinaryArray is valid (as is BinaryViewArray)
I added a workaround in
But this ticket tracks the work to actually support BinaryArray properly in VariantArray
Describe alternatives you've considered
Additional context
Activity
alamb commentedon Sep 22, 2025
@mbrobbel notes here here are the other types in the arrow spec we should be supporting
[-][Variant] Support BinaryArray in addition to `BinaryViewArray` for Variant[/-][+][Variant] Support `BinaryArray`/`LargeBinaryArray` in addition to `BinaryViewArray` for Variant[/+]AdamGS commentedon Mar 24, 2026
take
AdamGS commentedon Mar 24, 2026
I think there are two general approaches here:
I'm starting with the second approach as it seems much simpler, but I assume there will be some performance cost.
[Variant] Support Binary/LargeBinary children (apache#9610)
[Variant] Support Binary/LargeBinary children (apache#9610)