Apache Parquet

Noun · Development

Definitions

  1. A columnar storage file format optimized for analytics workloads. Stores data by column rather than by row, enabling efficient compression (similar values together) and predicate pushdown (skip irrelevant columns). The de facto standard for data lakes, used by Spark, DuckDB, Pandas, and most data tools.

    In plain English: A file format that stores data by column instead of by row, making analytical queries much faster and files much smaller.

    Example: "Convert the CSV exports to Parquet — the files shrink by 80% and analytical queries run 10x faster because they only read needed columns."

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