block

same as HDFS block

file

file metadata is required, data is not

row-group

a logical horizontal partitioning of the data into rows. no physical rep is guaranteed for row-group

column-chunk

a chunk of the data for a particular column

page

column chunks are divided into pages. a page is conceptually indivisible in terms of compression/encoding. multiple page types can be interleaved in a column chunk.

Files consists of 1+ row-groups. A row-group contains exactly one column chunk per column. Column chunks contain one or more pages.

4-byte magic number "PAR1"
<Column 1 Chunk 1>
<Column 2 Chunk 1>
...
<Column N Chunk 1>
<Column 1 Chunk 2>
<Column 2 Chunk 2>
...
<Column N Chunk 2>
...
<Column 1 Chunk M>
<Column 2 Chunk M>
...
<Column N Chunk M>
File Metadata
4-byte length in bytes of file metadata (little endian)
4-byte magic number "PAR1"