Today, it’s my great pleasure to announce the first public release of Hardwood, a new parser for the Apache Parquet file format, optimized for minimal dependencies and great performance. Hardwood is open-source (Apache License 2.0) and supports Java 21 or newer. You can grab it from Maven Central and start parsing your Parquet files with ease and efficiency. Why Hardwood? Apache Parquet has become the lingua franca of the modern data ecosystem. With its columnar data layout, Parquet enables effi...