> And the API is barely above exposing the file-format. Nothing like "load this parquet file" into some object which you can then query for it's contents - you'

> And the API is barely above exposing the file-format. Nothing like "load this parquet file" into some object which you can then query for it's contents - you're dealing with blocks and sections and other file-format level entities. Yes, it's just a building block. The easiest way to use Parquet on Java is to use Spark's integration with it, because it provides the query engine for you. But, if I'm not mistaken, it's much bigger than Pandas. I also strongly dislike the Hadoop coupling (hey, it's called parquet-mr for a reason...), but it's more or less an invisible annoyance if you use Spark in an environment like Amazon EMR. I think you'll get a lot of confused responses from people if you want to try to build an application that reads Parquet directly. It's the disk format for a bunch of distributed database engines. They'll wonder how you plan on querying it.