Did you know that it's possible to extract data from Parquet files in Azure Data Lake Analytics? Well it is and the library just received a couple of updates, check it out over on its Github page.
First of all the library has just received an update to bring it up to the latest version of Parquet .NET (2.1.2 at the time of writing), this brings with it a range of updates and I recommend checking out some of the other posts here to find out what's been going on.
The other update is in how the library handles dates, by default Parquet .NET returns DateTimeOffset values when reading dates from parquet files, this is always the right thing to do as anyone who has ever had to work with time zones and offsets will tell you. However, U-SQL does not support the DateTimeOffset type for extracting data, so a small change has been made to convert the DateTimeOffset value to a DateTime, allowing the data to be extracted.
So, have a look, give it a go and if you find any problems then please raise an issue on Github or even contribute a fix yourself.