[DAlperin]

The story here isn't that they've invented a new format for user defined indexes (the one proposed here is sort of contrived and I probably wouldn't recommend in production) but rather demonstrating how the user defined metadata space of the parquet format can be used for application specific purposes.

I work on a database engine that uses parquet as our on-storage file format and we make liberal use of the custom metadata area for things specific to our product that any other parquet readers would just ignore.