Can columnar format occupy more space than row format in hive compression?

[#1]

Even after columnar compression techniques like parquet my files are turning out to be bigger than sequence files. I wanted to know that is columnar compression a sure shot way to compression or is there some kind of data which fails here.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Yess its possible only and only if there are no repetition in a column.
In this case one will end up with the file and meta info of the columnar file format.