Yes the tool could read the parquet files but in this instance it would not be optimal do so as there can by multiple versions of the parquet organized in date_time_stamp sub folders. The Table is updated to use the latest version so I just have to reference the same table in my ETL routine. Otherwise I would have to programmatically figure out the latest version of the parquet to read. It could be done but not preferred. Especially if I want to make updates/changes to the Delta Table, for that I have to do it over the JDBC connection.