Forest Hill, MD –27 April 2015– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache™ Parquet™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.

"The incubation process at Apache has been fantastic and really the last step of making Parquet a community driven standard fully integrated within the greater Hadoop ecosystem," said Julien Le Dem, Vice President of Apache Parquet.

Apache Parquet is an Open Source columnar storage format for the Apache™ Hadoop® ecosystem, built to work across programming languages and much more:

• processing frameworks (MapReduce, Apache Spark, Scalding, Cascading, Crunch, Kite)
• data models (Apache Avro, Apache Thrift, Protocol Buffers, POJOs)
• query engines (Apache Hive, Impala, HAWQ, Apache Drill, Apache Tajo, Apache Pig, Presto, Apache Spark SQL)

"At Twitter, Parquet has helped us scale our big data usage by in some cases reducing storage requirements by one third on large datasets as well as scan and deserialization time. This translated into hardware savings as well as reduced latency for accessing the data. Furthermore, Parquet being integrated with so many tools creates opportunities and flexibility regarding query engines," said Chris Aniszczyk, Head of Open Source at Twitter. "Finally, it’s just fantastic to see it graduate to a top-level project and we look forward to further collaborating with the Apache Parquet community to continually improve performance."

"Parquet’s integration with other object models, like Avro and Thrift, has been a key feature for our customers," said Ryan Blue, Software Engineer at Cloudera. "They can take advantage of columnar storage without changing the classes they already use in their production applications."

"At Netflix, Parquet is the primary storage format for data warehousing. More than 7 petabytes of our 10+ Petabyte warehouse is Parquet formatted data that we query across a wide range of tools including Apache Hive, Apache Pig, Apache Spark, PigPen, Presto, and native MapReduce. The performance benefit of columnar projection and statistics is a game changer for our big data platform," said Daniel Weeks, Software Engineer at Netflix. "We look forward to working with the Apache community to advance the state of big data storage with Parquet and are excited to see the project graduate to full Apache status."

"Stripe’s data warehouse has been built on Parquet from the beginning," said Avi Bryant, Engineering Manager at Stripe. "Every aspect of our pipeline, from data import to machine learning to adhoc SQL analysis, uses Apache Parquet as the common interchange format."

"I was extremely happy to see Parquet arrive as an Incubator project," said Chris Mattmann, Apache Parquet Incubator Mentor, and Chief Architect, Instrument and Science Data Systems Section at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "After talking with some in its community there was a real match with this columnar data format technology and its community with the way that we do things here at the ASF. Parquet has had an exemplar Incubation, and the project has big things ahead of it. I am encouraging my Data Science Team at NASA to evaluate it for data representation especially as it relates to our science holdings in Earth, planetary and space sciences, and astrophysics."

Catch Apache Parquet in action at the Hadoop Summit, 9-11 June 2015 in San Jose, California. The Apache Parquet project welcomes contributions and community participation through mailing lists, face-to-face MeetUps, and user events. For more information, visit http://parquet.apache.org/community/

Apache Parquet software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Parquet, visit http://parquet.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheParquet

The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/.

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server –the world’s most popular Web server software. Through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 500 individual Members and 4,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation’s official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Cerner, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Avro", "Apache Avro", "Drill", "Apache Drill", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "Parquet", "Apache Parquet", "Pig", "Apache Pig", "Spark", "Apache Spark", "Thrift", "Apache Thrift", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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