HomeInterview QuestionsA CSV file is around 10 GB. How would you read, tr…

A CSV file is around 10 GB. How would you read, transform, and load it?

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid level
1Times asked
Jul 2026Last seen
Jul 2026First seen

💡 Model Answer

For a 10 GB CSV, loading it into memory is impractical. I would use a distributed processing framework like Apache Spark or Dask. First, I would read the file in a streaming or chunked manner, specifying the correct schema to avoid type inference overhead. Spark’s DataFrame API can read CSV with options such as header, inferSchema, and delimiter. After loading, I would perform transformations using Spark SQL or DataFrame operations—filtering, aggregations, joins, or UDFs—leveraging Catalyst’s optimization. Finally, I would write the result to a scalable storage format like Parquet or ORC, partitioned by a key (e.g., date) to improve query performance. If Spark isn’t available, I’d use Python’s pandas with read_csv in chunks, process each chunk, and append to a Parquet file using pyarrow. This approach keeps memory usage bounded and scales horizontally.

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