History of Apache Arrow: Developing a standard for in-memory columnar processing

>In the Big Data world, we didn’t see much talk about columnar data until Google’s Dremel paper in 2010

Try 2005:

http://db.csail.mit.edu/projects/cstore/#papers

We had a very large Vertica installation up in 2009.

But as Abadi has noted it's an in-memory format, and it removes a lot of bottlenecks at the CPU-Memory interface. In that sense it's quite new; we've been wrestling with tricky in-memory formats for some time.