[bradford]

Not OP, but I'd guess there's greater industry awareness of relational DBs than there are of parquet files. I've been on the receiving end of a Parquet file that I didn't know how to crack open the ambiguity on how to proceed was frustrating.

[wenc]

This is true. There are two tools you need to know for this: duckdb and visidata. With these tools, Parquet is almost as easy as CSVs (but a few orders of magnitude more powerful and faster)

Parquet is also usable in polars and pandas, and Apache Spark too but that’s getting into complicated territory.

DuckDB it’s literally just

   Select * from ‘s3://bucket/*.parquet’