Not at all. It was just swapping out readcsv with readparquet in R and Python. It was painless. Granted my dataset was mostly categorical so that’s why it compressed down so much, but it was a real lifesaver.

It was also nice to be able to read while bundles of parquet a into a single dataframe easily. So is nice for “sharding” really big parquets over multiple files. Or fitting under file size limits on git repos.

gzip probably would have been fine for that case even without parquet?

Gzip did help, but not as much as parquet. I don’t remember the exact sizes but I think parquet was was 3GB->20MB and gzip was like 3GB->180MB or something.

Also gzip was an extra step of unzip then read.