Thanks Wes, your proposed additional data type makes more sense to me. > As a first use case for this I would be personally looking to address > reads of encoded data from > Parquet format without an intermediate pass through dense format > (which can be slow and wasteful for heavily compressed string data)
Feel free to grab ARROW-3772 off of me...I had hoped to work on it after finishing ARROW-3769 but it seems that introducing this additional data type will be necessary to make progress on that issue.
