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support the Arrow PyCapsule Interface without a pyarrow dependency #15699

Description

@tswast

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The polars community uses the arrow in-memory format without a need for a dependency on the heavy weight pyarrow package, but the easiest way to get arrow out of and into BigQuery with this client requires the use of the pyarrow dependency.

Describe the solution you'd like

Expose the Arrow PyCapsule Interface on RowIterator (returned by QueryJob.result(), Client.query_and_wait(), Client.list_rows()). This functionality should not require pyarrow. See: https://gist.github.com/tswast/99b017b20386e324f5c7d2bd49f21b5f for a related example of how this could be done.

Describe alternatives you've considered

  • Separate package exposing the Arrow PyCapsule Interface
  • Always require pyarrow
  • Directly integrate into polars (in-progress)

Additional context

Activity

  1. parthea commented on Jan 12, 2026

    @parthea
    Contributor

    Transferring to google-cloud-python as the code for python-bigquery will be migrated there in 1-3 weeks.

  2. parthea commented on Jan 12, 2026

    @parthea
    Contributor

    Transferring this issue back to python-bigquery.

  3. chalmerlowe commented on Mar 2, 2026

    @chalmerlowe
    Contributor

    This issue was moved from the following repo as part of the monorepo migration: googleapis/python-bigquery

  4. removed their assignment
    on Mar 27, 2026
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api: bigqueryIssues related to the BigQuery API.bigframestype: feature request‘Nice-to-have’ improvement, new feature or different behavior or design.

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