Parquet Reader

About Parquet Files

Apache Parquet is an open-source, columnar storage file format designed for efficient data processing and analytics. It is optimized for use with big data frameworks such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Apache Hive.

Unlike row-based formats (such as CSV or JSON), Parquet stores data by columns rather than by rows. This columnar layout enables high compression rates and faster query performance, particularly for analytical workloads that read only a subset of columns. Parquet supports efficient encoding schemes, nested data structures, and built-in schema definition, making it well suited for complex and large-scale datasets.

Because of its performance, compression efficiency, and strong ecosystem support, Parquet has become a standard format for data lakes, ETL pipelines, and business intelligence applications.