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Version: current [25.x]

Parquet File Best Practices

This topic provides general information and recommendations for Parquet files.

Reading Parquet Files​

Dremio's vectorized Parquet file reader improves parallelism on columnar data, reduces latencies, and enables more efficient resource and memory usage. The Parquet reader also improves reflection performance.

Dremio supports offheap memory buffers for reading Parquet files.

Parquet File Compression​

Use the store.parquet.compression support key to specify the compression method to use for Parquet files. The available values for store.parquet.compression are:

  • snappy (default)
  • gzip
  • zstd (available as of Dremio 24.1.0)
  • none

If you choose Zstandard (zstd) as the store.parquet.compression value, you can add the store.parquet.compression.zstd.level support key to specify the compression level to use. The default level is -3. Refer to the Zstandard documentation for information about available compression levels.

Parquet Limitations​

Take into consideration the following limitations when generating and configuring Parquet files. Failure to adhere to these restrictions may cause errors to trigger when using Parquet files with Dremio.

  • Maximum nested levels are restricted to 16. Multiple structs may be defined up to a total nesting level of 16. Exceeding this results in a failed query.
  • Maximum allowable elements in an array are restricted to 128. The maximum allowable number of elements in an array may not exceed this quantity. Additional elements beyond the allowed 128 results in a query failure.
  • Maximum footer size is restricted to 16MB. The footer consists of metadata. This includes information about the version of the format, the schema, extra key-value pairs, and metadata for columns in the file. When the footer exceeds this size, a query failure occurs.

When using other tools to generate Parquet files for consumption in Dremio, we recommend the following configuration:

TypeImplementation
Row GroupsImplement your row groups using the following: A single row group per file, and a target of 1MB-25MB column stripes for most datasets (ideally). By default, Dremio uses 256 MB row groups for the Parquet files that it generates.
PagesImplement your pages using the following: Snappy compression, and a target of ~100K page size. Use a recent Parquet library to avoid bad statistics issues.
StatisticsUse a recent Parquet library to avoid bad statistics issues.