File Format Depth

Concepts: paFileIngestion

The #1 Screening Question 'Why Parquet?' is asked in over half of pipeline interviews as a screening question. Here is the three-word answer: columnar, compressed, predicate-pushdown. Then expand: 'Parquet stores each column separately, so analytical queries that only need 3 out of 100 columns read 97% less data. Same-type values grouped together compress 10x better than mixed-type rows. And row group statistics let the engine skip entire chunks without reading them.'