[PARQUET-2117] Add rowPosition API in parquet record readers

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.12.3
• Component/s: parquet-mr
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Prakhar Jain
• Created: 01/Feb/22 19:05
• Updated: 20/Jun/22 10:56
• Resolved: 08/Jun/22 18:16

Description

Currently the parquet-mr RecordReader/ParquetFileReader exposes API’s to read parquet file in columnar fashion or record-by-record.

It will be great to extend them to also support rowPosition API which can tell the position of the current record in the parquet file.

The rowPosition can be used as a unique row identifier to mark a row. This can be useful to create an index (e.g. B+ tree) over a parquet file/parquet table (e.g.  Spark/Hive).

There are multiple projects in the parquet eco-system which can benefit from such a functionality: 

1. Apache Iceberg needs this functionality. It has this implementation already as it relies on low level parquet APIs -  Link1, Link2
2. Apache Spark can use this functionality - SPARK-37980

Issue Links

• is depended upon by: PARQUET-2145 Release 1.12.3
• is related to: PARQUET-2161 Row positions are computed incorrectly when range or offset metadata filter is used
• is related to: SPARK-37980 Extend METADATA column to support row indices for file based data sources