Parquet is a columnar storage file format optimized for use with big data processing frameworks like Apache Drill. It offers several advantages when querying:
1. Columnar Storage: Storing data in columns allows efficient compression and encoding, reducing I/O and improving query performance.
2. Schema Evolution: Parquet supports adding, removing, or modifying columns without rewriting existing files, enabling schema evolution.
3. Compression: Columnar storage enables better compression ratios as similar data types are stored together, reducing storage costs.
4. Predicate Pushdown: Apache Drill can push filtering operations down to the storage layer, reading only relevant columns, speeding up queries.
5. Vectorization: Parquet’s columnar format aligns well with vectorized query engines like Apache Drill, allowing faster execution using SIMD instructions.
