> Most Parquet files are bulk exports from various data analysis pipelines or databases, often appearing as full snapshots rather than incremental updates

I'm not really familiar of how datasets are managed by them, but all of the table formats (iceberg, delta and hudi) support appending and some form of "merge-on-read" deletes that could help with this use case. Instead of always fully replacing datasets on each dump, more granular operations could be done. The issue is that this requires changing pipelines and some extra knowledge about the datasets itself. A fun idea might involve taking a table format like iceberg, and instead of using parquet to store the data, just store the column data with the metadata externally defined somewhere else. On each new snapshot, a set of transformations (sorting, spiting blocks, etc) could be applied that minimizes that the potential byte diff between the previous snapshot.

I just don't understand how these guys could literally give terrabytes of free storage and free data transfer to everyone. I was doing some calculation of cost from my storage and transfers and if they used something like S3 it would costed them 1000s of dollar. And I don't pay them anything.

One additional thought regarding query performance is that content-defined row groups allow localized joins and aggregations which are much faster than the globally-shuffled kind.

If the sharding key matches (or is a subset of) a join or group-by key, then identical values are local to a single shard, which can be processed independently.

This type of thing is typically done at large granularity (eg one shard per MPP compute node), but there are also benefits down to the core or thread level.

Another tip is that if no shard key is defined, hash the whole row as a default.

I'm surprised that Parquet didn't maintain the Arrow practice of using mmap-able relative offsets for everything. Although these could be called relative to the beginning of the file.

Wouldn't be it easier to extend delta-rs to support deduplication?

Love this post and the visuals! Great work

How does this compare to rsync/rdiff?