# Apache DataFusion Protobuf Serialization / Deserialization
[Apache DataFusion] is an extensible query execution framework, written in Rust, that uses [Apache Arrow] as its in-memory format.
This crate contains code to convert DataFusion plans to and from bytes using [Protocol Buffers],
which can be useful for sending plans over the network, for example when building a distributed
query engine.
See [API Docs] for details and examples.
[apache arrow]: https://arrow.apache.org/
[apache datafusion]: https://datafusion.apache.org/
[protocol buffers]: https://protobuf.dev/
[api docs]: http://docs.rs/datafusion-proto/latest