Feature request: parquet data files support

[RandomFractals]

how hard would it be to add parquet data files support to the perspective viewer?

in relation to this vsscode ext. I've decided to work on utilizing your lib:

https://github.com/RandomFractals/vscode-data-preview

I belive it can be done in JS with this lib I found:

https://github.com/ZJONSSON/parquetjs

most likely just a matter of providing proper data read interfaces for perspective viewer to consume and display that data

[mhkeller]

I'm also curious if perspective could be pointed to a parquet file. I was looking into using duckdb to export database queries as parquet files and then pointing perspective at that file to load the results.

[texodus]

This feature is out-of-scope for Perspective. For the Python side, pyarrow and friends already support this (we would just recompile this support into Perspective anyway). For JavaScript, Perspective is designed to be used as a component, not a platform, preferring small size and performance to coming bundled with every possible format.

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[mhkeller]

For anyone looking to try this, here's a script that will read in a parquet file and give you back the buffer representation of an arrow file: https://gist.github.com/mhkeller/855ca5c0a6582e4ead7d36e6f8169fdd

There is likely a better way to do this and I'm not taking this approach, but sharing this here in case it helps someone.

Related discussion: #1157