geoparquet-io: Fast GeoParquet tool

#geoparquet-io is an open-source #CLI tool and #Python library for converting, inspecting, optimizing, and partitioning #GeoParquet files, automatically applying GeoParquet performance best practices along the way. Its extract command can pull geodata from sources such as #WFS, #Esri ArcGIS Feature Services, or BigQuery into GeoParquet.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

April 6, 2026

New tool alert: geoparquet-io is both a stand-alone CLI1 tool and a Python library for reading, transforming, and writing GeoParquet files. Remember, GeoParquet is a cloud-native2 geodata format (basically, the geo-flavour of the Parquet3 format).

geoparquet-io is open-source, carries the Apache 2.0 license and its version 1.0 is currently in beta. It can be installed using pipx and pip, respectively, or using uv.

With geoparquet-io, you can convert other formats to GeoParquet, inspect and optimize existing GeoParquet files, add a spatial index, partition large files using several partition strategies, and more. The tool also supports building pipelines of operations in Python or piping intermediate results through a workflow via Unix pipes in the CLI. The website features performance tips and best practices. If you use geoparquet-io for conversion to GeoParquet, these are applied automatically.

The extract tool looks particularly interesting: It can be used to directly extract geodata from, for example, a WFS4, Esri ArcGIS Feature Services, or BigQuery5 tables and write it to GeoParquet.

Footnotes

  1. Command-line interface.↩︎

  2. I.e., taking full advantage of the cloud computing model; in the data world typically through enabling partial downloads of file contents through so-called HTTP range requests.↩︎

  3. An open-source, columnar storage file format designed for efficient data processing.↩︎

  4. Web Feature Service, an OGC standard interface for querying and retrieving vector geodata over the web.↩︎

  5. Google’s data warehouse (DWH) Platform-as-a-Service offering.↩︎