Parquet is a columnar storage format for Hadoop, supported by Presto. Storing data as columns as opposed to rows enables Presto to fulfill queries more efficiently. By discarding unwanted data in rows, and preventing unnecessary scans, columnar storage saves disk space and improves query performance for larger data sets.
In Parquet, data is first horizontally partitioned into groups of rows, then within each group, data is vertically partitioned into columns. Data for a particular column is stored together via compression and encoding to save space and improve performance. Each Parquet Presto file has a footer that stores codecs, encoding information, as well as column-level statistics, e.g., the minimum and maximum number of column values.
There have been several improvements made to Presto’s Parquet reader by the community, most notably by Uber, to enhance performance with features such as pushdown.
For developers, a useful tool-set for working with Presto Parquet files is parquet-tools which allows you to see the schema contained in the file, view data, examine data types etc. Parquet-tools can be installed by pip https://pypi.org/project/parquet-tools/ or installed on a Mac with brew install parquet-tools or cloned and built from https://github.com/apache/parquet-mr
Presto’s Parquet support is a popular choice for data storage.