How does Google BigQuery use Parquet-style columnar storage internally?

BigQuery uses Capacitor, its proprietary columnar format, which shares the same fundamental principles as Parquet: columnar layout, aggressive encoding, and embedded statistics. When you export from BigQuery or import into it, Parquet is the preferred external format.

Exporting BigQuery tables to Parquet:

bq extract \
  --destination_format PARQUET \
  --compression SNAPPY \
  myproject:mydataset.mytable \
  gs://my-bucket/export/*.parquet

Loading Parquet into BigQuery:

bq load \
  --source_format=PARQUET \
  myproject:mydataset.newtable \
  gs://my-bucket/data/*.parquet

BigQuery can also query external Parquet tables via BigLake without loading — applying its own predicate pushdown against Parquet statistics in GCS.

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