The GeoParquet files for geometries are typically written and read with the
sfarrow package, but to add only a select few genes to the SFE object
say for visualization purposes, the Parquet GDAL driver is required in order
to use GDAL's SQL to query the GeoParquet file to only load the few genes
requested. The transcript spots from a large dataset can take up a lot of
memory if all loaded.
Details
The Parquet driver has been supported since GDAL 3.5.0. The arrow C++
library must be installed in order to make the Parquet driver available. When
arrow is installed, newer versions of GDAL installed from Homebrew (Mac)
should have the Parquet driver. For Linux, the binary from apt-get's
default repo is 3.4.1 (as of April 2024). To use the Parquet driver, GDAL may
need to be installed from source. See script from the geospatial rocker.
A Voyager docker container with the Parquet driver will soon be provided.