Sample Parquet files
Apache Parquet is a columnar data storage format, a standard in data engineering: Spark, Pandas, DuckDB, BigQuery. Below are sample .parquet files with various schemas, types and compression options to download
🧠 How Parquet works
Parquet stores data by column, not by row. Values of one column sit next to each other, so they compress better and can be read selectively — you can pull only the columns you need. The file is split into row groups, and the footer at the end holds the schema and statistics (min/max) for quickly skipping blocks.
