High-Performance Querying of Parquet Files on Data Lakes

This technical whitepaper discusses the challenges and solutions associated with querying Parquet files stored in cloud object storage, particularly focusing on AWS S3. It outlines how Alluxio serves as a high-performance caching layer to enhance query performance on petabyte-scale data lakes. The document details the limitations of direct querying from S3, which typically results in high latencies, and presents Alluxio's capabilities to achieve sub-millisecond query latencies without requiring changes to existing data formats or storage solutions. Key features of Alluxio include its ability to offload partial read operations, support for horizontal scaling, and efficient caching mechanisms that significantly reduce overhead. The paper also describes the architecture of Alluxio, emphasizing its role in balancing low latency, high throughput, and cost-effectiveness. By leveraging architectural optimizations and workload-specific strategies, Alluxio demonstrates a potential for achieving over 1,000x performance improvements in latency-sensitive workloads, making it a valuable solution for organizations managing large-scale data lakes.