Excel does not output Parquet.

True. But also Excel probably collapses into a black hole going straight to hell trying to handle 21GB of data.

Excel .xlsx files are limited to 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns.

Excel .xls files are limited to 65,536 rows and 256 columns.

21GB/s, not 21GB ...

mawk would handle a 21 GB csv (or maybe one true awk) fast enough.

Excel often outputs broken csv :)

I have been privileged in my career to never need to parse Excel output but occasionally feed it input. Especially before Grafana was a household name.

Putting something out so manager stops asking you 20 questions about the data is a double edged sword though. Those people can hallucinate more than a pre-Covid AI engine. Grafana is just weird enough that people would rather consume a chart than try to make one, then you have some control over the acid trip.

Or HDF5 or any other format which is actually meant to store large amounts of floating point data.

Because that would be too logical. :)

It is an interesting benchmark anyway.