Avro

This is a pure Julia implementation of the Apache Avro data standard. It provides convenient APIs for reading/writing data directly in the avro format, or as schema-included object container files.

Installation

The package can be installed by typing in the following in a Julia REPL:

julia> using Pkg; Pkg.add("Avro")

Implementation status

It currently supports:

• All primitive types
• All nested/complex types
• Logical types listed in the spec (Decimal, UUID, Date, Time, Timestamps, Duration)
• Binary encoding/decoding
• Reading/writing object container files via the Tables.jl interface
• Supports the xz, zstd, deflate, and bzip2 compression codecs for object container files

Currently not supported are:

• JSON encoding/decoding of objects
• Single object encoding or schema fingerprints
• Schema resolution
• Protocol messages, calls, handshakes
• Snappy compression

Package motivation

Why use the avro format vs. other data formats? Some benefits include:

• Very concise binary encoding, especially object container files with compression
• Very fast reading/writing
• Objects/data must have well-defined schema
• One of the few "row-oriented" binary data formats