# arrow_extendr
Pass arrow-rs objects to and from an R session
### Motivating Example
Say we have the following `DBI` connection which we will send requests to using arrow.
The result of `dbGetQueryArrow()` is a `nanoarrow_array_stream`. We want to
count the number of rows in each batch of the steam using Rust.
```r
# adapted from https://github.com/r-dbi/DBI/blob/main/vignettes/DBI-arrow.Rmd
library(DBI)
con <- dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite())
data <- data.frame(
a = runif(10000, 0, 10),
b = rnorm(10000, 4.5),
c = sample(letters, 10000, TRUE)
)
dbWriteTable(con, "tbl", data)
```
We can write an extendr function which creates an `ArrowArrayStreamReader`
from an `&Robj`. In the function we instantiate a counter to keep track
of the number of rows per chunk. For each chunk we print the number of rows.
```rust
#[extendr]
/// @export
fn process_stream(stream: Robj) -> i32 {
let rb = ArrowArrayStreamReader::from_arrow_robj(&stream)
.unwrap();
let mut n = 0;
rprintln!("Processing `ArrowArrayStreamReader`...");
for chunk in rb {
let chunk_rows = chunk.unwrap().num_rows();
rprintln!("Found {chunk_rows} rows");
n += chunk_rows as i32;
}
n
}
```
With this function we can use it on the output of `dbGetQueryArrow()` or other Arrow
related DBI functions.
```r
query <- dbGetQueryArrow(con, "SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE a < 3")
process_stream(query)
#> Processing `ArrowArrayStreamReader`...
#> Found 256 rows
#> Found 256 rows
#> Found 256 rows
#> ... truncated ...
#> Found 256 rows
#> Found 256 rows
#> Found 143 rows
#> [1] 2959
```