Compression algorithms in Parquet Java

Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format targeted at analytical workloads, but it can be used to store any type of structured data, addressing a variety of use cases.

One of its most notable features is the ability to efficiently compress data using different compression techniques at both stages of the processing process. This reduces storage costs and improves read performance.

This article explains Parquet’s file compression in Java, provides usage examples, and analyzes its performance.

Compression technology

Unlike traditional row-based storage formats, Parquet uses a columnar approach, allowing the use of more specific and efficient compression techniques based on locality and value redundancy of the same type of data.

Parquet writes information in binary format and applies compression at two different levels, each using a different technique:

• When writing the value of the column, it will adaptively select the encoding type according to the characteristics of the initial value: dictionary encoding, run-length encoding, bit packing, incremental encoding, etc.
• Whenever a certain number of bytes is reached (default is 1MB), a page is formed and the binary block is compressed using a programmer-configurable algorithm (no compression, GZip, Snappy, LZ4, ZSTD, etc.).

Although the compression algorithm is configured at the file level, the encoding of each column is automatically selected using an internal heuristic (at least in the parquet-java implementation).

The performance of different compression technologies depends heavily on your data, so there is no one-size-fits-all solution that guarantees the fastest processing time and lowest storage consumption. You need to perform your own tests.

Code

Configuration is simple and only requires explicit setting when writing. When reading a file, Parquet discovers which compression algorithm is used and applies the corresponding decompression algorithm.

Configure algorithm or codec

In Carpet and Parquet using Protocol Buffers and Avro, to configure the compression algorithm, just call the builder's withCompressionCodec method:

Carpet

<code class="language-java">CarpetWriter<T> writer = new CarpetWriter.Builder<>(outputFile, clazz)
    .withCompressionCodec(CompressionCodecName.ZSTD)
    .build();</code>

Avro

<code class="language-java">ParquetWriter<Organization> writer = AvroParquetWriter.<Organization>builder(outputFile)
    .withSchema(new Organization().getSchema())
    .withCompressionCodec(CompressionCodecName.ZSTD)
    .build();</code>

Protocol Buffers

<code class="language-java">ParquetWriter<Organization> writer = ProtoParquetWriter.<Organization>builder(outputFile)
    .withMessage(Organization.class)
    .withCompressionCodec(CompressionCodecName.ZSTD)
    .build();</code>

The value must be one of the values ​​available in the CompressionCodecName enumeration: UNCOMPRESSED, SNAPPY, GZIP, LZO, BROTLI, LZ4, ZSTD, and LZ4_RAW (LZ4 is deprecated, LZ4_RAW should be used).

Compression level

Some compression algorithms provide a way to fine-tune the compression level. This level is usually related to how much effort they need to put into finding repeating patterns; the higher the compression level, the more time and memory the compression process requires.

Although they come with default values, they can be modified using Parquet's generic configuration mechanism, albeit using different keys for each codec.

Additionally, the values ​​to choose are not standard and depend on each codec, so you must refer to the documentation for each algorithm to understand what each level offers.

ZSTD

To reference level configuration, the ZSTD codec declares a constant: ZstandardCodec.PARQUET_COMPRESS_ZSTD_LEVEL.

Possible values ​​range from 1 to 22, default value is 3.

<code class="language-java">CarpetWriter<T> writer = new CarpetWriter.Builder<>(outputFile, clazz)
    .withCompressionCodec(CompressionCodecName.ZSTD)
    .build();</code>

LZO

To reference level configuration, the LZO codec declares a constant: LzoCodec.LZO_COMPRESSION_LEVEL_KEY.

Possible values ​​range from 1 to 9, 99 and 999, with the default value being '999'.

<code class="language-java">ParquetWriter<Organization> writer = AvroParquetWriter.<Organization>builder(outputFile)
    .withSchema(new Organization().getSchema())
    .withCompressionCodec(CompressionCodecName.ZSTD)
    .build();</code>

GZIP

It does not declare any constants, you must use the string "zlib.compress.level" directly, possible values ​​range from 0 to 9, the default value is "6".

<code class="language-java">ParquetWriter<Organization> writer = ProtoParquetWriter.<Organization>builder(outputFile)
    .withMessage(Organization.class)
    .withCompressionCodec(CompressionCodecName.ZSTD)
    .build();</code>

---

Performance Test

To analyze the performance of different compression algorithms, I will use two public datasets containing different types of data:

• New York City Taxi Trip: Contains a large number of numeric and a small number of string values ​​in several columns. It has 23 columns and contains 19.6 million records.
• Cohesion Project of the Italian Government: Many columns contain floating point values ​​as well as a large number of various text strings. It has 91 columns and contains 2 million rows.

I will evaluate some of the compression algorithms enabled in Parquet Java: UNCOMPRESSED, SNAPPY, GZIP, LZO, ZSTD, LZ4_RAW.

As expected, I will be using Carpet with the default configuration provided by parquet-java and the default compression level for each algorithm.

You can find the source code on GitHub, testing was done on a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 4800HS CPU and JDK 17.

File size

To understand the performance of each compression, we will use the equivalent CSV file as a reference.

格式	gov.it	纽约出租车
CSV	1761 MB	2983 MB
未压缩	564 MB	760 MB
SNAPPY	220 MB	542 MB
GZIP	**146 MB**	448 MB
ZSTD	148 MB	**430 MB**
LZ4_RAW	209 MB	547 MB
LZO	215 MB	518 MB

Of the two tests, compression using GZip and Zstandard was the most efficient.

Using only Parquet encoding technology, file size can be reduced to 25%-32% of the original CSV size. With additional compression applied, it will be reduced to 9% to 15% of the CSV size.

Write

How much overhead does compressing information bring?

If we write the same information three times and calculate the average seconds, we get:

算法	gov.it	纽约出租车
未压缩	25.0	57.9
SNAPPY	25.2	56.4
GZIP	39.3	91.1
ZSTD	27.3	64.1
LZ4_RAW	**24.9**	56.5
LZO	26.0	**56.1**

SNAPPY, LZ4 and LZO achieve similar times to no compression, while ZSTD adds some overhead. GZIP had the worst performance, with write times slowing down by 50%.

Read

Reading a file is faster than writing because less computation is required.

The time in seconds to read all columns in the file is:

算法	gov.it	纽约出租车
未压缩	11.4	37.4
SNAPPY	**12.5**	**39.9**
GZIP	13.6	40.9
ZSTD	13.1	41.5
LZ4_RAW	12.8	41.6
LZO	13.1	41.1

The read time is close to that of uncompressed information, and the decompression overhead is between 10% and 20%.

Conclusion

No algorithm is significantly better than the others in terms of read and write times, all are in a similar range. In most cases, compressing information can make up for the space savings (and transmission) time lost.

In these two use cases, the deciding factor in choosing one or the other algorithm is probably the compression ratio achieved, with ZSTD and Gzip being prominent (but writing times being inferior).

Each algorithm has its advantages, so the best option is to test it with your data and consider which factor is more important:

• Minimizes storage usage as you store large amounts of rarely used data.
• Minimize file generation time.
• Minimize read time as files are read multiple times.

Like everything in life, it's a trade-off and you have to see what best compensates for it. In Carpet, by default it uses Snappy for compression if you don't configure anything.

Implementation details

The value must be one of the values ​​available in the CompressionCodecName enumeration. Associated with each enumeration value is the name of the class that implements the algorithm:

<code class="language-java">CarpetWriter<T> writer = new CarpetWriter.Builder<>(outputFile, clazz)
    .withCompressionCodec(CompressionCodecName.ZSTD)
    .build();</code>

Parquet will use reflection to instantiate the specified class, which must implement the CompressionCodec interface. If you look at its source code, you'll see that it's in the Hadoop project, not Parquet. This shows how well Parquet is coupled to Hadoop in its Java implementation.

To use one of these codecs, you must ensure that you have added the JAR containing its implementation as a dependency.

Not all implementations are present in the transitive dependencies you have when adding parquet-java, or you may be excluding Hadoop dependencies too aggressively.

In the org.apache.parquet:parquet-hadoop dependency, include implementations of SnappyCodec, ZstandardCodec, and Lz4RawCodec, which transitively imports the snappy-java, zstd-jni, and aircompressor dependencies along with the actual implementations of these three algorithms.

In hadoop-common:hadoop-common dependency, contains the implementation of GzipCodec.

Where are the implementations of BrotliCodec and LzoCodec? They are not in any Parquet or Hadoop dependencies, so if you use them without adding additional dependencies, your application will not be able to use files compressed in those formats.

• To support LZO, you need to add the dependency org.anarres.lzo:lzo-hadoop to your pom or gradle file.
• The situation with Brotli is more complicated: the dependency is not in Maven Central and you must also add the JitPack repository.

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