Drill-400 change parquet reader to place varbinary fields into VarCharVectors, allowing them to be returned by default as UTF-8 Strings. Note that this will only be the case with newer parquet files that were produced after Converted Types were added to the format. This metadata stores the desired intrepertation of a column, but was not originally in the format. For older files you will still need to case binary data to Varchar.
Drill 419 - dictionary encoding for parquet reader.
Dictionary page completed, including varbinary, varchar, int, float, double, and long.