vogon-poetry
Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts
With my blurglecruncheon, see if I don’t!
- Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, in Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
…and on similar lines we have…
Columnar Layout
Array of Structs
Struct of Arrays
Metadata Medatata
Zero Copy
Distributed
Relational
Data Engineering
VOGON POETRY
By order of Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,
Recitation shall now begin, without mercy.
Resistance is useless.
Family A, Mechanical Sympathy
Physical form dominates performance
Movement is the cost
Batch beats tuple-at-a-time
Family B, Do Less And Prove It
Declare what; let the planner choose how
The fastest work is skipped work
Approximate on purpose
Family C, Distribution
Placement decides what is cheap
Family D, State, Time, And Safe Re-runs
Durability is an append-only log plus a snapshot
Time and ordering are plural and uncertain
Design every pipeline to be safe to re-run
Family E, Storage As A Substrate
A table is metadata over immutable files
Compose interchangeable layers through open standards
Family F, Operating Under Load And Trust
A system that cannot say no will fail
Data is a product with a contract
Family G, Policy And Economics
Enforce policy at the chokepoint
Cost is an architecture decision
Family H, Data For AI
Meaning becomes geometry
Feed the accelerator
There.
You may now applaud.
SCIPY 2026! This paper was shortlisted for SciPy 2026
Interactive Concept Viewer
Open this link to interact with all the poetry.
Refs:
- Apache Arrow Specifications
- Apache Arrow on GitHub
-
Apache Arrow Python Cookbook
- Vogons and Vogon Poetry
- Notable Vogons
- HHGTTG
Unrelated learning
- to indent things in markdown - add
because markdown will shave off all whitespaces.
Zero copy? what zero copy? Buffers? I want to hit someone right now by Vogon Constant Mown