consider fastparquet

[darkblue-b]

Feature description

the parquet data format is increasingly popular; existing GDAL-OGR code[0] relies on Apache Arrow libs to ingest parquet .

There exists a pure-python alternate fastparquet[1] also known as python-parquet. The only unusual library dependency for fastparquet is named cramjam[2].

Enhancement -- consider adding fastparquet as an alternate parquet reader implementation in GDAL-OGR.

Other implementations of parquet readers include Apache Polars[3] and DuckDB[4][build]

[0] https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/master/ogr/ogrsf_frmts/parquet/CMakeLists.txt

[1] https://pypi.org/project/fastparquet/
[2] https://github.com/milesgranger/cramjam
[3] https://pola.rs/
[4] https://github.com/duckdb

Additional context

No response

[rouault]

What would be the purpose of switching to an alternative implementation for Parquet reading ? Is it related to the discussion on the lack of libarrow/libparquet Debian packaging in offficial Debian repositories? But libarrow/libparquet is still packaged in an Apache APT repository, so it is not that bad

Regarding the listed alternatives:

• fastparquet: using a Python package to implement a OGR driver is not something realistic, at least as an official prime-time driver, as it would cause serious issues for integration and potentially performance. RFC 76: OGR Python drivers exists, but it has not been designed for performance, and more for quick development of drivers
• DuckDB. AFAIK, DuckDB packaging story is pretty much existent, with a static linking strategy that is miles away from traditional packaging habits. And with Parquet support probably being hidden and not available as a lib that others can use
• Polars. AFAICS, no advertized C/C++ API. It seems the Python binding is done directly with Rust, and not through C. So not something that could be natively usable by a OGR C++ driver

All in all, nothing obvious to me that would justify making the effort to develop a new implementation of the OGR Parquet driver. libarrow/libparquet is in my perception the reference implementation, is actively developed and maintained, and is feature full.