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Epic: Add Union to DType #7705

@connortsui20

Description

@connortsui20

This Epic is for adding a new Union logical type as a variant of DType.

Status

Proposed.

No work has been done on this yet.

Goal

We want to support a logical Union type in Vortex. This would complement our logical product type (Struct) with a sum type (Union), allowing the Vortex type system to be more expressive. Additionally, we will want to have encodings that are well-optimized for specific use cases (sparse vs dense union).

Motivation

We would like to move towards full compatibility with the Arrow specification, and union is (AFAICT) the last canonical format that Vortex does not support.

We also would like to cover all of the Arrow canonical extension types, and GeoArrow is built on top of the union type.

Unresolved questions

  • TODO how and when do we want do this?

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    epicPublic roadmap umbrella for a major initiative, with work tracked in sub-issues.

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