Understanding Parquet Format for beginners

A walk through of the most important file format to ever exist

There’s been a lot of talk about open table formats like Iceberg and Delta over the last few years. While these formats are awesome, many of the underlying efficiency and performance gains can be attributed to Parquet, with Iceberg/Delta serving as a nice management layer on top.

Think of Iceberg/Delta as the middle manager who gets all the credit, whil…