Programming

17354 readers

548 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

parquet vs csv (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml to c/programming@programming.dev

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

What's your take on parquet?

I'm still reading into it. Why is it closely related to apache? Does inly apache push it? Meaning, if apache drops it, there'd be no interest from others to push it further?

It's published under apache hadoop license. It is a permissive license. Is there a drawback to the license?

Do you use it? When?

I assume for sharing small data, csv is sufficient. Also, I assume csv is more accessible than parquet.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] jim@programming.dev 11 points 2 months ago

Do you use it? When?

Parquet is really used for big data batch data processing. It's columnar-based file format and is optimized for large, aggregation queries. It's non-human readable so you need a library like apache arrow to read/write to it.

I would use parquet in the following circumstances (or combination of circumstances):

The data is very large
I'm integrating this into an analytical query engine (Presto, etc.)
I'm transporting data that needs to land in an analytical data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.)
Consumed by data scientists, machine learning engineers, or other data engineers

Since the data is columnar-based, doing queries like select sum(sales) from revenue is much cheaper and faster if the underlying data is in parquet than csv.

The big advantage of csv is that it's more portable. csv as a data file format has been around forever, so it is used in a lot of places where parquet can't be used.