> Parquet is the opposite of simple. Even when good libraries are available (which it usually isn't), it is painful to read a Parquet file. Try reading a Parquet file using Java and Apache Parquet lib, for example.
It all seems rather complex, and even worse: not actually all that well described. I suppose all the information is technically there, but it's really not a well-design well-written specification that's easy to implement. The documentation seems like an afterthought.
Yeah, it all seems very application specific. I mean, for starters columnar storage isn't really appropriate for a lot of data. That's perfectly fine! Nothing wrong with any of this. Just means it's not a great candidate for a general application-agnostic data-exchange format.
I skimmed their docs a bit: https://parquet.apache.org/docs/
I would not look forward to implementing that.
It all seems rather complex, and even worse: not actually all that well described. I suppose all the information is technically there, but it's really not a well-design well-written specification that's easy to implement. The documentation seems like an afterthought.
This is probably why good libraries are rare.