# (Geo)Parquet

New in version 3.5.

Driver short name

Parquet

Build dependencies

Parquet component of the Apache Arrow C++ library

From https://databricks.com/glossary/what-is-parquet: “Apache Parquet is an open source, column-oriented data file format designed for efficient data storage and retrieval. It provides efficient data compression and encoding schemes with enhanced performance to handle complex data in bulk. Apache Parquet is designed to be a common interchange format for both batch and interactive workloads.”

This driver also supports geometry columns using the GeoParquet specification.

Note

The driver should be considered experimental as the GeoParquet specification is not finalized yet.

The GeoParquet 1.0.0-beta1 specification is supported since GDAL 3.6.2

## Driver capabilities

Supports Create()

This driver supports the `GDALDriver::Create()` operation

Supports Georeferencing

This driver supports georeferencing

Supports VirtualIO

This driver supports virtual I/O operations (/vsimem/, etc.)

## Creation issues

The driver supports creating only a single layer in a dataset.

## Layer creation options

- COMPRESSION=string: Compression method. Can be one of `NONE` (or `UNCOMPRESSED`), `SNAPPY`, `GZIP`, `BROTLI`, `ZSTD`, `LZ4_RAW`, `LZ4_HADOOP`. Available values depend on how the Parquet library was compiled. Defaults to SNAPPY when available, otherwise NONE.

- GEOMETRY_ENCODING=WKB/WKT/GEOARROW: Geometry encoding. Defaults to WKB. Other encodings (WKT and GEOARROW) are not allowed by the GeoParquet specification, but are handled as an extension, for symmetry with the Arrow driver.

- ROW_GROUP_SIZE=integer: Maximum number of rows per group. Default is 65536.

- GEOMETRY_NAME=string: Name of geometry column. Default is `geometry`

- FID=string: Name of the FID (Feature Identifier) column to create. If none is specified, no FID column is created. Note that if using ogr2ogr with the Parquet driver as the target driver and a source layer that has a named FID column, this FID column name will be automatically used to set the FID layer creation option of the Parquet driver (unless `-lco FID=` is used to set an empty name)

- POLYGON_ORIENTATION=COUNTERCLOCKWISE/UNMODIFIED: Whether exterior rings of polygons should be counterclockwise oriented (and interior rings clockwise oriented), or left to their original orientation. The default is COUNTERCLOCKWISE.

- EDGES=PLANAR/SPHERICAL: How to interpret the edges of the geometries: whether the line between two points is a straight cartesian line (PLANAR) or the shortest line on the sphere (geodesic line) (SPHERICAL). The default is PLANAR.

- CREATOR=string: Name of creating application.

## SQL support

SQL statements are run through the OGR SQL engine. Statistics can be used to speed-up evaluations of SQL requests like: “SELECT MIN(colname), MAX(colname), COUNT(colname) FROM layername”

## Dataset/partitioning read support

Starting with GDAL 3.6.0, the driver can read directories that contain several Parquet files, and expose them as a single layer. This support is only enabled if the driver is built against the `arrowdataset` C++ library.

Note that no optimization is currently done regarding filtering.

## Multithreading

Starting with GDAL 3.6.0, the driver will use up to 4 threads for reading (or the maximum number of available CPUs returned by `CPLGetNumCPUs()` if it is lower by 4). This number can be configured with the configuration option `GDAL_NUM_THREADS`, which can be set to an integer value or `ALL_CPUS`.

## Conda-forge package

The driver can be installed as a plugin for the `libgdal` conda-forge package with:

    conda install -c conda-forge libgdal-arrow-parquet

## Links

- Apache Parquet home page

- Parquet file format

- GeoParquet specification

- Related driver: Arrow driver