Simplified Serialization with ParquetConvert

https://github.com/elastacloud/parquet-dotnet is about to be released in the following few days. Since v3.0 was pushed to the public, it saw a lot of interest and appraisal for it's incredible performance boost, however there were problems as well. To reiterate, v3.0 was a complete rewrite of 2.0 and allowed you to get deeper into parquet internals, especially API for creating *row groups* , writing columns directly, controlling row group sizes etc. Although this was a big improvement in the library's core itself, it made it harder to use for a general audience, because v2.0 had a handy *row-based interface* for accessing data. Although working with rows slows down parquet library, you will eventually run into a situation where you need to work with rows anyway. For instance, writing utilities for viewing parquet data, converting between parquet and row-based formats like CSV and so on. Therefore, V3.1 *resurrects row-based access* and makes it faster and better. The way you work with rows has changed slightly but mostly you shouldn't notice any differences at all. They come in play when working with complex data structures like maps, list, structures etc. Preview documentation for this feature is located here https://github.com/elastacloud/parquet-dotnet/blob/features/rows/doc/rows.md so feel free to browse and leave feedback either on this page or raise an issue on GitHub. PARQ We'd also like to announce that we're introducing .NET Core Global Tool in this version called parq . Full description is located here https://github.com/elastacloud/parquet-dotnet/blob/features/rows/doc/parq.md . Essentially it's a hassle free way to work with parquet files locally and the number of commands supported will continue to grow.

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.

Some pretty good news on the speed front - indicative of our gut feeling that parquet-dotnet is a fast implementation of Parquet for the dotnet framework due to our approach. It's worth noting that we will be tuning for performance optimisation in the coming months, so things will get better still. https://github.com/elastacloud/parquet-dotnet/blob/master/doc/performance.md