Spark Parquet Statistics(min/max) integration

Question

I have been looking into how Spark stores statistics (min/max) in Parquet as well as how it uses the info for query optimization. I have got a few questions. First setup: Sp

Answer 1

For the first question, I believe this is a matter of definition (what would be the min/max of a string? lexical ordering?) but in any case as far as I know, spark's parquet currently only indexes numbers.

As for the second question, I believe that if you look deeper you would see that spark is not loading the files themselves. Instead it is reading the metadata so it knows whether to read a block or not. So basically it is pushing the predicate to the file (block) level.