PARQUET
Apache Parquet
Judgement: Adopt
De-facto columnar storage; baseline for analytics.
Columnar storage format optimised for analytics: predicate pushdown, column pruning, efficient compression, and typed schemas.
Effectively the default storage format underneath every modern table format (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi).
Why it counts as a standard
Parquet's on-disk format is published as an open spec with independent reader/writer implementations in C++, Java, Rust, Go, and Python. Every analytics engine and lakehouse format depends on the format spec, not on a particular library. That makes the file format itself the standard.
At a glance
- Category
- File Formats
- Governance
- Apache Software Foundation
- Status
- Stable; the columnar default
- First released
- 2013
Links
Related standards
Other standards in File Formats.
- AVRO — Apache Avro
- CSV — Comma-Separated Values (RFC 4180)
- JSON — JavaScript Object Notation
- XML — Extensible Markup Language
- YAML — YAML Ain't Markup Language
- ORC — Apache ORC (Optimized Row Columnar)
- Lance
See PARQUET in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare PARQUET against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.