Add support for INT96 columns and large decimal columns

[davidtsai]

Problem

When reading parquet files:

• INT96 columns are not being parsed correctly and are being truncated.
• Files with large DECIMAL columns stored in FIXED_LEN_BYTE_ARRAY is not supported

Solution

• Parses INT96 columns into a BigInt to return untruncated values.
• Adds support for parsing FIXED_LEN_BTYE_ARRAY columns into arbitrary precision DECIMALs.

Change summary:

• Tidy, well formulated commit message
• Another great commit message
• Something else I/we did

Steps to Verify:

1. A setup step / beginning state
2. What to do next
3. Any other instructions
4. Expected behavior
5. Suggestions for testing

[davidtsai]

PR likely still needs tests etc to be mergeable, but contains proof of concept to parse parquet files with large integers/decimals properly.

[keen85]

@davidtsai, will this PR also bring support for parquet files where TIMESTAMP columns are encoded as INT96? Example file see here: part-00000-43831db6-19d5-4964-a8c8-cb8d6d1664b3-c000.snappy.parquet

[davidtsai]

@keen85 it's halfway there to being able to support it. Right now I'm handling it in our application code:

function parquetInt96DateToLuxon(int96: bigint, timezone?: string) {
  // Extract nanoseconds and Julian day number
  const nanoseconds = int96 & BigInt('0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF'); // first 8 bytes
  const julianDay = int96 >> BigInt(64); // last 4 bytes

  // Julian day number for Unix epoch (January 1, 1970)
  const unixEpochJulianDay = BigInt(2440588);

  // Calculate the difference in days between the Julian day and the Unix epoch
  const daysSinceEpoch = julianDay - unixEpochJulianDay;

  // Convert days to milliseconds
  // 86400000 milliseconds in a day
  const millisecondsSinceEpoch = daysSinceEpoch * BigInt(86400000);

  // Convert nanoseconds to milliseconds and add to the Unix timestamp
  const totalMilliseconds = millisecondsSinceEpoch + (nanoseconds / BigInt(1000000));

  // Create a DateTime object in UTC
  const date = DateTime.fromMillis(Number(totalMilliseconds), { zone: 'utc' });

  if (timezone) {
    // // Convert to the specified timezone
    return date.setZone(timezone, { keepLocalTime: true });
  }
  return date;
}

I'm not sure when we can reliably assume the INT96 column is a date in a parquet file. If there is documented convention for that, would be easy enough to add the above function to this library itself.

[keen85]

@davidtsai awesome, thanks for your work!

If there is documented convention for that

• https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PARQUET-323: "INT96 is only used to represent nanosec timestamp in Impala for some historical reasons, and should be deprecated"
• https://github.com/apache/parquet-format/blob/master/LogicalTypes.md: INT96 does not appear any more officially in parquet-docs. The code still contains it, also with hint to deprecation: https://github.com/apache/parquet-format/blob/master/src/main/thrift/parquet.thrift#L36
• popular data processing engines that still use/support INT96 for TIMESTAMP encoding:
  • Apache Spark
  • Apache Impala
  • Apache Arrow
  • Google Big Query

...not sure if this is proof enough 😅

[wilwade]

@davidtsai Thanks for the PR!

Enabled tests, and seeing some fail, but looking closer, I think they might have been bad tests before perhaps? Or might be a mix. Tests should now run for this PR automatically. (At least I think that's what I told GitHub)

Let me know if you want/need some help, although you likely understand this part of the codebase better than I now.

[davidtsai]

Yes, the test was looking for strings, so they would need to be updated to match numbers and bigints. It is a breaking API change though, but in my opinion the correct behavior to not always return strings. I can work on this PR more in about a week to get it over the finish line if it'll be helpful!

• David

On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 11:57 AM Wil Wade @.***> wrote:

@.**** commented on this pull request.

In lib/reader.ts https://github.com/LibertyDSNP/parquetjs/pull/109#discussion_r1457919099 :

@@ -874,9 +874,13 @@ async function decodeDictionaryPage(cursor: Cursor, header: parquet_thrift.PageH }; }

• return decodeValues(opts.column!.primitiveType!, opts.column!.encoding!, dictCursor, (header.dictionary_page_header!).num_values, opts)
• .map((d:Array) => d.toString());

I think removing this has caused some of the test errors

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/LibertyDSNP/parquetjs/pull/109#pullrequestreview-1830460046, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAJMWIFSZQ5MGLDXQOPSYUTYPF5B5AVCNFSM6AAAAABBPLE3N2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43YUDVNRWFEZLROVSXG5CSMV3GSZLXHMYTQMZQGQ3DAMBUGY . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: @.***>

[wilwade]

@davidtsai Javascript is limited to 53 bit numbers, so doesn't it need to be something besides a native number for 96?

[wilwade]

Closing as stale. Please reopen if this is not so.