Apache Parquet Sees Most Active Development Decade as AI and Lakehouse Demands Surge

Apache Parquet, the 13-year-old columnar data format that underpins most of the world's analytical storage, is undergoing its most significant period of development in a decade as of 2026. The past year alone has introduced a native variant type for semi-structured data, geospatial types, new floating-point encoding, and proposed support for AI embeddings and unstructured data blobs. Two converging forces are driving this activity: the lakehouse era has made Parquet the foundational layer beneath table formats like Iceberg and Delta, while the rise of AI has introduced workloads the format's original 2013 design never anticipated. A lengthy 80-plus message debate on the developer mailing list over Parquet's versioning future signals how contested and consequential these architectural decisions have become. Originally created by engineers at Twitter and Cloudera, Parquet is now being substantially renovated even as it remains in active, large-scale production use worldwide.