Add Support for Tableau NUMERIC types about pantab

[MauroCL75]

The same thing happens for BYTE_ARRAY type. In that case the workaround is to cast to TEXT.

[WillAyd]

Currently pantab doesn't support Tableau's numeric columns because there is no equivalent data type in the standard pandas type system, which was available at the time pantab was written. This could work if we made pyarrow a required dependency and mapped Tableau's numeric back to pyarrows decimal type.

Would need a community PR to make that happen - is that something you are interested in?

[MauroCL75]

I would say this would make pantab usable for my project. Many thanks.

[WillAyd]

With pantab 4.0 this is getting closer to the realm of possibility. Would need the nanoarrow project to add Decimal functions as a pre-cursor first, which looks to be on the horizon

[WillAyd]

Actually I was chatting with Tableau about this on their slack channel and as it turns out Numeric data types have a very limited implementation. The Tableau tool itself does not currently work with Numeric types, and Hyper as a database will not have the ability to store Numeric data until version 3 gets released (we are at 2 currently; I do not know when 3 will happen).

For now you can really only ever read NUMERIC types in Hyper as a result of a cast expression or algorithm