- Companies like Spotify need low-latency access to large datasets for online services and AI agents, but distributed SQL engines add seconds of overhead for point queries.
- Random Access Parquet (RAP) bridges the gap by using an external index to map keys directly to file locations, enabling precise ranged reads without scanning.
- RAP operates on existing Parquet files, eliminating the need for separate copies in key-value stores.
- The external index is a definitive multimap that returns exact file and row numbers for a given key, reducing dependent reads.