Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge? Please describe what you are trying to do.

Deletion vectors in the Delta Lake and Iceberg table formats are defined in terms of row numbers within individual Parquet files. To be able to filter out rows defined as deleted by deletion vectors we need a way to know the file row number of the rows read by the Arrow Parquet reader.

Describe the solution you'd like

The Arrow Parquet reader should optionally return a column containing the row number of each row. We add a method ArrowReaderBuilder::with_row_numbers(self, with_row_numbers: bool) -> Self, which configures the Arrow Parquet reader to add an extra column named row_number to its schema (possibly the method could be ArrowReaderBuilder::with_row_number_column(self, with_row_numbers: Option<String>) -> Self to make the column name configurable). This column contains the row number within the file.

Describe alternatives you've considered

There is a corresponding issue on Datafusion apache/datafusion#13261. It considers an alternative using primary keys and existing SQL primitives, but this comes with a performance penalty. The consensus on the issue is

I agree with the assessment that the information must be coning from the file reader itself.

That is, the Arrow Parquet reader.

Additional context

Please see apache/datafusion#13261 for the corresponding issue in Datafusion. There is also a discussion in Datafusion to add system/metadata columns in apache/datafusion#14057 through which this additional file row number column could be exposed. Though, we do not need system/metadata columns to be available to support deletion vectors in delta-rs or iceberg-rs, since the delta-rs and iceberg-rs Datafusion based readers use the Datafusion ParquetSource directly to construct the execution plans for the scans of their TableProviders.