# A curated payments table is plain Parquet

Canonical URL: <https://datadriven.io/problems/a-curated-payments-table-is-plain-parquet-stripe-adds-new-f-473caec7>

Domain: Pipeline Design · Difficulty: medium

## Problem

A curated payments table is plain Parquet. Stripe adds new fields monthly; each schema change forces a 12-hour rewrite of every partition because plain Parquet embeds column names in the file footer. Apply the section's schema-evolution framing and replace the plain Parquet table with a lakehouse format whose metadata layer makes column additions, drops, and type widenings a sub-second metadata commit.

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