Using StringView / German Style Strings to Make Queries Faster: Part 1 - Reading Parquet

This blog post discusses the implementation of StringView in Rust's Apache Arrow and its integration into Apache DataFusion, significantly accelerating string-intensive queries by up to 200%. The authors describe their journey, including challenges faced and solutions implemented. They also provide an overview of how StringView works and its benefits over traditional string representations. Additionally, they share insights on optimizing UTF-8 validation, implicit data copy avoidance, and helping the compiler generate more efficient code. The post concludes by highlighting end-to-end query performance improvements achieved with StringView in a ClickBench benchmark.