How to read a modestly sized Parquet data-set into an in-memory Pandas DataFrame without setting up a cluster computing infrastructure such as Hadoop or Spark? This is only a moderate amount of data that I would like to read in-memory with a simple Python script on a laptop. The data does not reside on HDFS. It is either on the local file system or possibly in S3. I do not want to spin up and configure other services like Hadoop, Hive or Spark.
I thought Blaze/Odo would have made this possible: the Odo documentation mentions Parquet, but the examples seem all to be going through an external Hive runtime.
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Answer
pandas 0.21 introduces new functions for Parquet:
import pandas as pd
pd.read_parquet('example_pa.parquet', engine='pyarrow')
or
import pandas as pd
pd.read_parquet('example_fp.parquet', engine='fastparquet')
The above link explains:
These engines are very similar and should read/write nearly identical parquet format files. These libraries differ by having different underlying dependencies (fastparquet by using numba, while pyarrow uses a c-library).