I've recently played with the Overture Maps datasets which are in .parquet and I agree that there is a learning curve. One thing that's nice about .parquet is

I've recently played with the Overture Maps datasets which are in .parquet and I agree that there is a learning curve. One thing that's nice about .parquet is typical Macs come with 128/256GB SSDs and you can query 300GB of parquet in S3 without needing all those files on your local hard drive. Some of these queries are also surprisingly fast but I haven't looked into how it works. Edit: Having used MySQL and Postgres, I actually think DuckDB is better than either.