How do I read a Parquet in R and convert it to an R DataFrame?

Question

I\'d like to process Apache Parquet files (in my case, generated in Spark) in the R programming language.

Is an R reader available? Or is work being done on one?

Answer 1

You can use the arrow package for this. It is the same thing as in Python pyarrow but this nowadays also comes packaged for R without the need for Python.

git clone https://github.com/apache/arrow.git
cd arrow/cpp && mkdir release && cd release

# It is important to statically link to boost libraries
cmake .. -DARROW_PARQUET=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DARROW_BOOST_USE_SHARED:BOOL=Off
make install

Then you can install the R arrow package:

devtools::install_github("apache/arrow/r")

And use it to load a Parquet file

library(arrow)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'arrow'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:utils':
#> 
#>     timestamp
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     array, table
read_parquet("somefile.parquet", as_tibble = TRUE)
#> # A tibble: 10 x 2
#>        x       y
#>       
#> …