How to read a Parquet file into Pandas DataFrame?

Question

How to read a modestly sized Parquet data-set into an in-memory Pandas DataFrame without setting up a cluster computing infrastructure such as Hadoop or Spark? This is only

Answer 1

pandas 0.21 introduces new functions for Parquet:

pd.read_parquet('example_pa.parquet', engine='pyarrow')

or

pd.read_parquet('example_fp.parquet', engine='fastparquet')

The above link explains:

These engines are very similar and should read/write nearly identical parquet format files. These libraries differ by having different underlying dependencies (fastparquet by using numba, while pyarrow uses a c-library).