This looks really awesome, I need to explore this project more!
Here's a project which in part is built to fulfill a similar need: https://github.com/tobgu/qocache (I'm the author).
Most of the background/rationale for it and example usage can be found in the README of the original QCache project, linked from the above repo.
There are of course big differences between the projects but I find that they share the same goal of making random, file based, datasets easily accessible for querying.
I'll definitely let myself be inspired by Roapi, thanks!
Yes, in the abstract sense, which I guess you mean. QFrame (https://github.com/tobgu/qframe), the underlying dataframe used, is column oriented.