The Portland R community gathers at Lucky Labrador Brew Pub for a hands-on introduction to the arrow package for R -- the tooling that makes genuinely large datasets workable without leaving familiar dplyr workflows. The session covers what Apache Arrow and Parquet files actually do for storage size and read speed, then puts that to work: converting data to Parquet, querying it with standard dplyr verbs, and visualizing the results. The working example is Portland's own Biketown bike share data, millions of rides, which is enough volume to make the performance difference obvious rather than theoretical. Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop and follow along, though watching is fine too. Hosted by R-Ladies PDX, a chapter of the global R-Ladies organization, and open to everyone regardless of experience level. RSVP on Meetup is not strictly required but helps the organizers plan and keeps you in the loop on any last-minute changes.
