Part I: The file

What is a Parquet file, byte by byte?

This part takes a Parquet file apart. ch01 shows why a table is stored by column at all. ch02 opens a file from its last byte and finds every structure in it. ch03 reads the schema out of the footer, and ch04 shows how nested and nullable records fit into flat columns.

At the end of the part the reader can open any unencrypted Parquet file and say what is in it, without yet decoding a single value.

Built from commit c32f48e.