I mostly ignored Parquet until I realized DuckDB could handle it - now I'm much more likely to poke around with a Parquet file because I've got a solid toolkit available in both the CLI and as a Python library.

A couple of notes I've made about that:

Using DuckDB in Python to access Parquet data: https://til.simonwillison.net/duckdb/parquet

Use DuckDB to convert parquet to JSON and then open it in Datasette Lite: https://til.simonwillison.net/duckdb/parquet-to-json