👉 Column engineering is a specialized field within data engineering that focuses on designing, building, and maintaining the physical infrastructure of data pipelines, particularly those involving columnar storage formats like Apache Parquet or ORC. It involves creating and optimizing the columns of data tables to maximize query performance, minimize storage costs, and ensure efficient data processing. Engineers in this domain are responsible for partitioning data across columns to enable faster access, selecting appropriate compression techniques, and managing data distribution across storage nodes. They also optimize query execution plans, monitor system performance, and implement scalable solutions to handle large volumes of data, ensuring that the data warehouse or data lake can efficiently support complex analytical workloads.