Avro

Avro is a widely used file type within the Hadoop community. It is popular because it helps schema evolution. It contains serialized data with a binary format. An Avro file is splittable and supports block compression. It contains data and metadata. It uses a separate JSON file to define the schema format. When Avro data is stored in a file, its schema is stored with it so that files may be processed later by any program. If the program reading the data expects a different schema, this can be easily resolved, since both schemas are present.