Insights

10 Parquet Partitioning Best Practices

Parquet is a columnar file format that is gaining popularity in the Hadoop ecosystem. Partitioning data in Parquet can provide significant performance benefits. Here are 10 best practices for partitioning Parquet data.

Parquet is a columnar file format that is widely used in the Hadoop ecosystem. Partitioning data in Parquet can improve query performance by allowing the reader to skip over irrelevant data.

There are a few best practices to consider when partitioning data in Parquet:

1. Partitioning by date

Partitioning by date ensures that data is stored in a format that can be easily queried and filtered. For example, if you have a table that contains data for multiple years, you can partition the table by year. This would allow you to easily query the data for a specific year without having to scan the entire table.

Partitioning by date also makes it easier to manage your data. For example, you can drop partitions that are no longer needed or move partitions to new locations.

Finally, partitioning by date can improve performance. When data is stored in partitions, the query engine can skip over partitions that are not needed for the query, which can result in faster query times.

2. Partitioning by time of day

Partitioning by time of day ensures that data is always available for the most recent time period. For example, if you’re partitioning data by day, then data for the current day will always be available, even if it’s only partially complete. This is because new data is constantly being generated and added to the current day’s partition.

Partitioning by time of day also makes it easier to delete old data. For example, if you want to delete data older than 30 days, you can simply drop the partitions for those days. This is much simpler than having to delete individual files or records.

Finally, partitioning by time of day can improve query performance. This is because the data is organized in a way that makes it easy for the query engine to find the data it needs. For example, if you’re querying data for the month of January, the query engine can quickly identify the partitions that contain the data it needs and ignore the rest.

3. Partitioning by region

When you query data in a table that’s not partitioned by region, the entire table is scanned. This can be very costly, especially if the table is large. Partitioning by region allows you to limit the amount of data that’s scanned when you query data for a specific region.

For example, suppose you have a table that contains data for all of your customers worldwide. If you’re only interested in querying data for customers in Europe, you can specify the region when you query the table. This way, only the data for customers in Europe will be scanned, and the query will be much faster.

Partitioning by region is especially important when you’re using Athena, because Athena charges you based on the amount of data it scans. By partitioning your data by region, you can minimize your Athena costs.

4. Partitioning by data type

When you have a lot of data, it’s important to be able to filter and query that data quickly and efficiently. Partitioning your data by data type (e.g., string, int, date) allows you to do just that.

For example, let’s say you have a table with 1 billion rows and you want to query all the rows where the ‘name’ column is equal to ‘John’. If you haven’t partitioned your data by data type, the query will have to scan through the entire table, which will take a long time.

However, if you have partitioned your data by data type, the query will only need to scan the partitions that contain the ‘name’ column, which will be much faster.

So, partitioning by data type is a great way to improve the performance of your queries, and it’s something you should definitely do when working with large data sets.

5. Partitioning by source system

When you have multiple source systems, each with its own data format and structure, it can be difficult to query and combine the data in a single table. Partitioning by source system helps to overcome this challenge by storing data from each source system in its own partition. This makes it easier to query and combine the data, as well as to manage the data over time.

It’s also important to consider how data will be accessed when partitioning by source system. For example, if data from one source system is only ever going to be accessed by itself, then there’s no need to partition that data. However, if data from multiple source systems is going to be accessed together, then it’s important to partition the data so that it can be easily combined.

6. Partitioning by file size

Partitioning by file size ensures that each partition is of a manageable size, which makes it easier to work with. For example, if you have a large table with millions of rows, and you want to query only a small subset of the data, it would be much more efficient to query only the partitions that contain the data you’re interested in, rather than querying the entire table.

Partitioning by file size also makes it easier to compress data, since smaller files are easier to compress than larger files. And finally, partitioning by file size can help improve performance when reading data from Parquet files, since smaller files can be read faster than larger files.

7. Partitioning by event type

Partitioning by event type allows you to:

– More easily query for specific types of events
– More easily delete old or irrelevant data
– More easily update your schema as new event types are added

Without partitioning by event type, it would be much more difficult to perform any of these actions. So if you’re not already partitioning your parquet data by event type, start doing so today!

8. Partitioning by customer ID

When you have a customer ID column in your dataset, it’s easy to filter by specific customers when needed. For example, let’s say you want to pull data for only your top 10% most valuable customers. If your customer IDs are partitioned, you can quickly and easily query for only those partitions containing the IDs of your most valuable customers.

Partitioning by customer ID also makes it easy to update or delete data for specific customers. For example, if a customer cancels their subscription, you can quickly delete all of their data from your dataset without affecting any other customers’ data.

Overall, partitioning by customer ID is a best practice because it makes it easy to work with specific customers’ data, while still keeping all customers’ data in the same dataset.

9. Partitioning by product category

When you have a product catalog with multiple products and categories, it can be helpful to partition your data by category. This way, when you query the data, you can specify which category you want to query, and the query will only scan the data for that category.

This can be especially helpful if you have a large number of products and categories, and you don’t need to query all of the data all at once. Partitioning by product category can help you save time and resources when querying your data.

10. Partitioning by user segment

User segmentation is a process of dividing users into groups based on shared characteristics. By partitioning your data by user segment, you can more easily target specific groups of users with marketing and product messages. Additionally, you can analyze how different segments interact with your product, which can help you optimize your user experience.

Partitioning by user segment can also be helpful for performance reasons. If you have a large dataset, partitioning it by user segment can help you load only the data that is relevant to a particular group of users, which can improve query performance.

Previous

10 Azure Service Bus Best Practices

Back to Insights
Next

9 Liquibase Best Practices