Parquet is a highly compressed file format used in data engineering use cases, originating from the Apache Hadoop ecosystem and widely adopted as an open-source project by the Apache foundation. It uses storage and transport mechanisms for large amounts of data between different systems, commonly stored on cloud storage platforms like Amazon S3, and supports loading and unloading Parquet files to and from commercial offerings such as Snowflake's data warehouse. Unlike CSV files, which are text-based and require specific tools or programming language libraries to view and edit, Parquet is a binary format that offers efficiency in storing large amounts of data by organizing it into columns rather than rows and using dictionary encoding to compress shared values. With broad support across programming languages and tools, Parquet can be easily read and written, making it suitable for big data applications where storage and bandwidth are at a premium.