I want to use parquet more frequently, but it creates new problems that do not exist if I dump to CSV. Last I looked, there were not any good GUIs that would let someone quickly browse the data. Now it is just a blob lacking introspection. CSV has issues, but it is universal.
A bit round-about, but the slick way I discovered is to take a detour through DuckDB. DuckDB offers parquet bindings which you can link through a kind of foreign data interface and then query through SQL. Using this, you can then just browse parquet files through DBeaver or your IDE of choice. Hardly an out of the box solution I can offer to a random collaborator, but fantastic for your savvy analyst.
That is interesting to hear. Parquet input and output is on the wishlist for our Easy Data Transform software (currently we support CSV, Excel, XML, JSON and a few others). Anyone have any experience integrating Parquet read/write into a C++ application?
