Can pyarrow write multiple parquet files to a folder like fastparquet's file_scheme='hive' option?

Question:

I have a multi-million record SQL table that I’m planning to write out to many parquet files in a folder, using the pyarrow library. The data content seems too large to store in a single parquet file.

However, I can’t seem to find an API or parameter with the pyarrow library that allows me to specify something like:

file_scheme="hive"

As is supported by the fastparquet python library.

Here’s my sample code:

#!/usr/bin/python

import pyodbc
import pandas as pd
import pyarrow as pa
import pyarrow.parquet as pq

conn_str = 'UID=username;PWD=passwordHere;' + 
    'DRIVER=FreeTDS;SERVERNAME=myConfig;DATABASE=myDB'

#----> Query the SQL database into a Pandas dataframe
conn = pyodbc.connect( conn_str, autocommit=False)
sql = "SELECT * FROM ClientAccount (NOLOCK)"
df = pd.io.sql.read_sql(sql, conn)


#----> Convert the dataframe to a pyarrow table and write it out
table = pa.Table.from_pandas(df)
pq.write_table(table, './clients/' )

This throws an error:

File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pyarrow/parquet.py", line 912, in write_table
    os.remove(where)
OSError: [Errno 21] Is a directory: './clients/'

If I replace that last line with the following, it works fine but writes only one big file:

pq.write_table(table, './clients.parquet' )

Any ideas how I can do the multi-file output thing with pyarrow?

Answers:

Try pyarrow.parquet.write_to_dataset https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/python/pyarrow/parquet.py#L938.

I opened https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-1858 about adding some more documentation about this.

I recommend seeking support for Apache Arrow on the mailing list [email protected]. Thanks!

Answered By: Wes McKinney
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