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[WIP][POC][Parquet] Add PFOR encoding support - #10977

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@prtkgaur prtkgaur commented Sep 3, 2026

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@github-actions github-actions Bot added the parquet Changes to the parquet crate label Sep 3, 2026
CurtHagenlocher added a commit to clast-project/engineered-wood that referenced this pull request Sep 5, 2026
FSST's proposal asks for encoding 10 and does not get it. ALP claimed 10
too, shipped here first, and has since been merged into parquet.thrift on
parquet-format main -- so 10 is settled and not FSST's. FSST took 11 here,
which is what the arrow-rs proof-of-concept predicted would happen once ALP
landed.

11 is no longer free either. apache/parquet-format#617 proposes PFOR
(Patched Frame of Reference) as encoding 11, and unlike the FSST proposal it
arrives with two implementations behind it: apache/parquet-java#3775 and
apache/arrow-rs#10977, both of which write 11.

So FSST moves to 12 and 11 is reserved. The collision is not one a reader
can detect and report: a decoder reads the encoding byte, believes it, and
misreads the page body -- there is no magic or length that disagrees. That
makes it worth vacating the slot now rather than after files exist.

The number lives only on the enum member; every other site goes through
Encoding.Fsst, so this is a one-line format change plus its documentation.
Breaking for anyone who has persisted the numeric value, which the
[Experimental] attribute on the member has always warned about.

Adds EncodingWireNumberTests to pin all of the numbers, including that
nothing answers to 11. Round-trip tests cannot see a renumber: this library
would write and read its own files happily either way and only disagree
with other implementations, which is exactly the failure mode that produced
the move.

Also corrects a stale README claim that FSST_16 is unimplemented and
rejected; both symbol table widths have shipped since 2026-08-13.


Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UX8ZZxcXf5q4EqqwhDntNA

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CurtHagenlocher added a commit to clast-project/engineered-wood that referenced this pull request Sep 5, 2026
…239)

* fix(parquet)!: move FSST off encoding 11, which PFOR now claims

FSST's proposal asks for encoding 10 and does not get it. ALP claimed 10
too, shipped here first, and has since been merged into parquet.thrift on
parquet-format main -- so 10 is settled and not FSST's. FSST took 11 here,
which is what the arrow-rs proof-of-concept predicted would happen once ALP
landed.

11 is no longer free either. apache/parquet-format#617 proposes PFOR
(Patched Frame of Reference) as encoding 11, and unlike the FSST proposal it
arrives with two implementations behind it: apache/parquet-java#3775 and
apache/arrow-rs#10977, both of which write 11.

So FSST moves to 12 and 11 is reserved. The collision is not one a reader
can detect and report: a decoder reads the encoding byte, believes it, and
misreads the page body -- there is no magic or length that disagrees. That
makes it worth vacating the slot now rather than after files exist.

The number lives only on the enum member; every other site goes through
Encoding.Fsst, so this is a one-line format change plus its documentation.
Breaking for anyone who has persisted the numeric value, which the
[Experimental] attribute on the member has always warned about.

Adds EncodingWireNumberTests to pin all of the numbers, including that
nothing answers to 11. Round-trip tests cannot see a renumber: this library
would write and read its own files happily either way and only disagree
with other implementations, which is exactly the failure mode that produced
the move.

Also corrects a stale README claim that FSST_16 is unimplemented and
rejected; both symbol table widths have shipped since 2026-08-13.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UX8ZZxcXf5q4EqqwhDntNA

* feat(parquet): PFOR encoding, plain and delta, behind EWPARQUET0005

Implements PFOR (Patched Frame of Reference) for INT32 and INT64 as
proposed in apache/parquet-format#617, reader and writer, both modes.

Frame of reference plus bit-packing, with the values that do not fit the
chosen width stored separately as exceptions -- so one outlier stops
widening the packing for everyone. Each 1024-value vector independently
chooses whether to pack values or the differences between them, which is
the difference from DELTA_BINARY_PACKED: a column sorted only in stretches
gets the delta treatment on those stretches and frame-of-reference on the
rest. The writer measures the result and falls back to PLAIN per page, so
enabling the setting cannot make a file bigger.

The page layout is close enough to ALP's that PforDecoder is shaped like
AlpDecoder and the two read together: a 7-byte header, an offset array whose
offsets are measured from its own start, then self-describing vectors. What
PFOR adds is the delta flag in bit 7 of the width byte, a per-vector start
value, and a prefix sum -- which must run AFTER the exceptions are patched,
since an exception in a delta vector is a difference like any other.

TWO PLACES WHERE THE SPEC CONTRADICTS ITSELF, both found by measuring.

First, the frame. PforEncoding.md says it is the column's minimum. On the
shape PFOR exists for -- a tight cluster with a low sentinel -- that is the
wrong answer by a wide margin: the sentinel takes the frame, every ordinary
value sits tens of thousands above it, and the width is set by the gap
rather than the cluster. The spec's own Example 3 is that column and quotes
a width only a frame ABOVE the minimum can produce. So the minimum is a
candidate here, not the rule: the encoder buckets the range, slides a window
over the bucket counts per candidate width, lowers the winner onto the
smallest value it covers, and costs that frame exactly. The minimum is
always among the candidates and the only one costed from a real histogram,
so the search cannot do worse than the naive rule. arrow-rs does the same;
parquet-java does not. MEASURED, on 200k INT64 date keys with a null
sentinel: 0.65x against DELTA_BINARY_PACKED with the naive frame, 5.31x
with the search.

Second, width 0 in the delta mode. The spec says a reader may fill with the
start value and "get the same answer for any frame". It does not: fill and
the general path agree only when the frame is 0. No conforming writer can
emit anything else, so it is unreachable from real data -- but arrow-rs
takes the fill path and its own test pins an answer the general path
disagrees with. This decodes by the general path, which is what the numbered
decode steps say, and pins that.

Compression, 200k INT64 per shape, uncompressed, vs DELTA_BINARY_PACKED:
date keys + sentinel 5.31x, sorted in stretches 3.11x, tight cluster 1.74x,
sorted ids 1.20x, timestamps 1.20x, sequence with gaps 1.06x, random 1.03x.
With zstd the picture reverses everywhere except the outlier shapes, because
DBP's output on clean sequential data is far more compressible than PFOR's
tightly packed output. doc/parquet-pfor.md carries both tables and says so
plainly rather than quoting only the flattering half.

Tests sweep EVERY bit width, 0 to 32 and 0 to 64, at a vector length that is
a multiple of eight and one that is not, rather than sampling: this is the
class of bug that shipped once already in the RLE decoder (#236), and it is
invisible at every width but the broken one. Three byte-for-byte golden
vectors from arrow-rs's tests are the only assertions that could catch us
writing a self-consistent page nobody else can read.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UX8ZZxcXf5q4EqqwhDntNA

* fix(parquet): strip the UTF-8 BOMs the PFOR commit introduced

Three files were rewritten through a utf-8-sig encoder, which prepends a
BOM. CI's "Check for UTF-8 BOMs" step is exactly there to catch it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UX8ZZxcXf5q4EqqwhDntNA

* fix(parquet): bound a PFOR vector by the next offset, and reuse encoder scratch

Both from Copilot's review of #239.

A vector was sliced from its own offset to the END OF THE PAGE rather than
to the next vector's offset. Every per-vector truncation check then measured
against the wrong extent: a vector shorter than its own header claims read
on into the following vectors' bytes, satisfied every length check, and
returned their contents as data. Non-monotonic offsets were not checked at
all, so a decreasing offset silently decoded overlapping vectors.

Neither is a memory-safety problem -- the reads stay inside the page -- but
both are silent. The value count comes from the page header, so the output
is the right shape and the wrong data, with nothing raised to say so. The
two new tests fail on the old code with "No exception was thrown", which is
the whole point.

The first attempt at the truncation test did not discriminate: shifting the
next offset backwards also breaks the FOLLOWING vector, which threw for an
unrelated reason and made the test pass against the bug. It now widens the
first vector's declared bit width instead, leaving every offset alone, and
asserts the precondition that makes it a regression test -- short measured
against the next offset, long enough measured against the end of the page.

Also makes the encoder's per-page scratch thread-static. Encoding a page
allocated differences, residuals, exception positions, a histogram and the
frame-search buckets every time, about eleven kilobytes of garbage per page
of every integer column. Thread-static rather than pooled because column
chunks encode in parallel and each thread encodes one page at a time, which
is why ColumnChunkWriter.t_valuesBuffer is thread-static too.

Not taken: the reviewer also suggested writing vectors into one contiguous
page buffer instead of a byte[] per vector. That is a real cost, but the
byte[]-per-vector shape is AlpEncoder's as well, and changing it in one
encoder leaves the two inconsistent. Worth doing across both with a
benchmark behind it, not blind in this PR.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UX8ZZxcXf5q4EqqwhDntNA

* fix(parquet): drop the "11 is reserved" comment now that PFOR occupies 11

Merge fallout. #238 left a comment above the FSST member reserving 11 for
PFOR; this branch replaced it with the member itself, and merging main back
in reinstated the comment alongside the member it describes. "Reserved
rather than reused" now sits directly above Pfor = 11.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UX8ZZxcXf5q4EqqwhDntNA

---------

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-authored-by: copilot-swe-agent[bot] <198982749+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: CurtHagenlocher <904803+CurtHagenlocher@users.noreply.github.com>
Encode INT32 and INT64 pages as independently decodable vectors with
searched frames, optional differencing, bit-packed residuals, and patched
exceptions. Validate wire-derived bounds before reading and preserve modular
arithmetic at each type's width.
Include PFOR in integer Arrow-writer round trips and verify that column
metadata records the requested encoding. Reject unsupported physical types
while preserving page-version, nullability, dictionary-fallback, and row-group
coverage.
Measure throughput and compression ratio across modeled analytical columns
and sorted inputs. Compare PFOR with and without differencing against delta
bit packing, RLE bit packing, and compressed plain values, checking every
result before timing.

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