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Posted by u/kaushiksrini 4 months ago
Show HN: Parqeye – A CLI tool to visualize and inspect Parquet filesgithub.com/kaushiksrini/p...
I built a Rust-based CLI/terminal UI for inspecting Parquet files—data, metadata, and row-group-level structure—right from the terminal. If someone sent me a Parquet file, I used to open DuckDB or Polars just to see what was inside. Now I can do it with one command.

Repo: https://github.com/kaushiksrini/parqeye

alentred · 4 months ago
Very nice that it can show the metadata. If you rather focus on the data itself, a Swiss army knife in the terminal is VisiData [1] . It works with many formats from CSV to Parquet. You'd need to install Pyarrow I think to read Parquet files. VisiData is great to not only peek into the file but filter it, sort, compute simple metrics and even can plot a histogram or scatterplot for ex. I avoided a lot of Jupyter notebooks by using VisiData :)

[1] https://www.visidata.org/

bigshik · 4 months ago
Nice work—this hits a real pain point with Parquet. My main use case is debugging partitioned datasets on S3 with schema drift and skew, where I care about: which files/partitions have schema mismatches, weird row-group stats (all-null, out-of-range, huge skew), and doing that via metadata only.

Right now parqeye looks mainly single-file focused. Do you have plans for a “dataset mode” that takes a dir/S3 prefix and surfaces per-file/row-group summaries (row counts, min/max, null %, schema diffs vs a reference file) using just Parquet stats so it scales to tens of GB? Or do you see parqeye intentionally staying a single-file inspector?

nathanscully · 4 months ago
I found a similar tool called nail-parquet[1] which has some nice query functions. I packaged[2] it up for nixpkgs but it’s stuck in merge limbo…

[1] https://github.com/Vitruves/nail-parquet [2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/449066

jasonjmcghee · 4 months ago
Yours looks much better for your use case, but fwiw you can do it in a single command with duckdb too (but not interactive etc.):

    duckdb -c "from 'foo.parquet'"
but maybe still useful for other formats or multi-file or remote situations

llimllib · 4 months ago
I use a little shell alias that drops me into duckdb with the file loaded into a table for interactive querying:

https://github.com/llimllib/personal_code/blob/c1a74b1b9527f...

kylebarron · 4 months ago
Looks great!

Another seemingly extremely similar project released in the last few days: https://github.com/raulcd/datanomy

kaushiksrini · 4 months ago
a growing need to look inside columnar data files!
fluffet · 4 months ago
Great! I worked a lot with parquet like 5 years ago. The frustration and tilt working with the tooling was immense. Thank you for building this, it feels like resolving some old knot in my soul.

Some kind soul made this repository then, and I found it on like the 13th page of Google while in the depths of despair. It is my most treasured GitHub star, a the shining beacon that saved me. I see it has saved 17 other people too.

https://github.com/casidiablo/parquet-tools-for-dumb-people-...

hilti · 4 months ago
Similar tool for JSONL files: I built JSONL Viewer Pro after repeatedly crashing VS Code trying to inspect multi-GB training datasets and IoT device logs with nested objects.

Native Mac/Windows app with multi-threaded parsing (simdjson), automatic nested object flattening, and handles 10M+ rows instantly.

For HN: Use code HN100 for free access

https://iotdatasystems.gumroad.com/

Built with C++ for native performance (~6MB app, not Electron).

Would love feedback from folks working with large JSONL files.

tomtom1337 · 4 months ago
Super quick feedback - opening that link on my phone shows me two options next to each other, seemingly with the same name / description (followed by …) and same pricetag. I had to turn my phone sideways to see that there is a windows and a Mac version.

I think you can afford the extra characters to show the whole page in portrait mode. (iPhone 16 pro Safari)

https://imgur.com/a/aTxO3sp

hilti · 4 months ago
I will change the description. Thank you!
hilti · 4 months ago
Quick update: Mac ZIP had a corruption issue that's now fixed. Anyone who downloaded in the last few hours - please re-download!

Also just added a Data Plot feature for visualizing numeric columns.

Thanks to everyone who reported the issue!

MayeulC · 4 months ago
This looks very handy, thank you for working on this and making it open source.

I did submit a feature request for vi keybindings; though I could look into contributing this myself if I find a bit of spare time.

The other thing that surprised me was the size of the binaries: 90MB for a TUI tool (x64 Linux)? I wonder what the bulk of that is? Is there an issue with LTO? An other commenter noticed as well.

It also looks like you are building against a relatively recent glibc (2.34), which limits compatibility with older systems. Building against an older glibc can be hard to do, so I am not faulting you here, and you do provide a musl fallback, which is appreciated (mandatory notice that the musl allocator can dramatically degrade the performance of rust programs, just in case you were not aware of this).

A few more ideas for improvements (you probably already have your own laundry list):

- Mouse support?

- Seeing that you do have graphs, it would be fun to see a scatter plot as well as a distribution plot under statistics in the "Row Groups" tab (though you probably pull these from the metadata, so that would require further processing, which may be out of scope).