GH-37046: [MATLAB] Implement featherread in terms of arrow.internal.io.feather.Reader

[kevingurney]

Rationale for this change

Now that #37044 is merged, we can re-implement featherread in terms of the new arrow.internal.io.feather.Reader class.

Once this change is made, we can delete the legacy build infrastructure and featherread MEX code.

What changes are included in this PR?

1. Reimplemented featherread in terms of the new arrow.internal.io.feather.Reader class.
2. We tried to maintain compatibility with the old code as much as possible, but since featherread is now implemented in terms of RecordBatch, there are some minor changes in behavior and support for some new data types (e.g. Boolean, String, Timestamp) that are introduced by these changes.
3. Updated arrow/matlab/io/feather/proxy/reader.cc to prevent a nullptr dereference that was occurring when reading a Feather V1 file created from an empty table by using Table::CombineChunksToBatch rather than a TableBatchReader.

Example

>> tWrite = table(["A"; "B"; "C"], [true; false; true], [1; 2; 3], VariableNames=["String", "Boolean", "Float64"])

tWrite =

  3x3 table

    String    Boolean    Float64
    ______    _______    _______

     "A"       true         1   
     "B"       false        2   
     "C"       true         3   

>> featherwrite("test.feather", tWrite)

>> tRead = featherread("test.feather")

tRead =

  3x3 table

    String    Boolean    Float64
    ______    _______    _______

     "A"       true         1   
     "B"       false        2   
     "C"       true         3   

>> isequaln(tWrite, tRead)

ans =

  logical

   1

Are these changes tested?

Yes.

1. Updated the existing tfeather.m and tfeathermex.m tests to reflect the new behavior of featherread. This mainly consists of error message ID changes.
2. Added a new test to verify that all MATLAB types supported by arrow.tabular.RecordBatch can be round-tripped to a Feather V1 file.
3. Added a new test to verify that a MATLAB table with Unicode Variablenames can be round-tripped to a Feather V1 file.

Are there any user-facing changes?

Yes.

1. Now that featherread is implemented in terms of arrow.internal.io.feather.Reader and arrow.tabular.RecordBatch, it supports reading more types like Boolean, String, Timestamp, etc. Note: We updated the code to cast logical/Boolean type columns containing null values to double and substitute null values with NaN. This mirrors the existing behavior of featherread for integer type columns containing null values.
2. There are some minor error message ID changes.
3. Cell arrays of strings with a single element (e.g. {'filename.feather'}) are now supported as a valid filename for featherread.

Future Directions

1. In the future, we may want to consider no longer casting columns with integer/logical type containing null values to double and substituting null values with NaN. This behavior isn't ideal in all cases (it can be lossy for types like uint64). This change would break compatibility.
2. Delete legacy Feather V1 code and build infrastructure.

Notes

1. Thank you @sgilmore10 for your help with this pull request!

• Closes: [MATLAB] Implement featherread in terms of arrow.internal.io.feather.Reader #37046

[kevingurney]

+1

[conbench-apache-arrow]

After merging your PR, Conbench analyzed the 5 benchmarking runs that have been run so far on merge-commit 95db0df.

There were no benchmark performance regressions. 🎉

The full Conbench report has more details. It also includes information about possible false positives for unstable benchmarks that are known to sometimes produce them.