How Parquet handles schema evolution when you add, remove, retype, rename, or reorder columns, how it compares to other formats, and best practices.
The compression codecs Parquet supports (Snappy, Gzip, Brotli, Zstandard, LZO), the speed and size tradeoffs of each, and how they pair with encoding.
How Parquet encodings work and when to use them: dictionary, run-length, bit-packing, delta, and plain, and how encoding pairs with compression.
Parquet metadata lives in the file footer: the schema, row group layout and per-column min/max statistics that let query engines skip data they do not need.
