apache/parquet-format resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2555 stars · 503 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

The official specification repository for the Apache Parquet columnar data file format, including the Thrift definitions of the metadata structures needed to read and write Parquet files. It defines the format itself rather than providing an implementation, which live in language-specific projects like parquet-java.

Use cases

• implement a parquet reader or writer in a new language
• understand the parquet file format specification
• generate thrift code for parquet metadata structures
• check how nested data is encoded in parquet
• verify compatibility of a parquet implementation against the spec

When to choose

• you are building or validating a Parquet implementation and need the authoritative format spec
• you need the Thrift IDL definitions to generate metadata serialization code
• you want to understand Parquet encoding, compression, or nested data layout at the format level

When to avoid

• you just want to read or write Parquet files in an application - use a language implementation like parquet-java, pyarrow, or parquet-rs instead
• you need a runnable library or CLI tool - this repository contains only specifications and Thrift definitions

Facets

dataset · maturity stable

serialization compression file-system documentation big-data analytics databases files cross-platform jvm python cpp rust go columnar-storage file-format-specification thrift hadoop-ecosystem data-lake olap data-engineering

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