Parquet
Parquet is an open-source columnar storage file format optimized for use with big data processing frameworks. It is designed for efficient data compression and encoding schemes, enabling high-performance analytical queries on large datasets. It is widely used in data lakes and data warehousing environments due to its compatibility with tools like Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Apache Impala.
Developers should learn Parquet when working with big data analytics, as it significantly reduces storage costs and improves query performance by reading only relevant columns. It is essential for use cases involving data lakes, ETL pipelines, and analytical workloads where fast aggregation and filtering are required, such as in financial analysis, log processing, or machine learning data preparation.