Apache Avro is becoming one of the most popular data serialization formats nowadays, and this holds true particularly for Hadoop-based big data platforms because tools like Pig, Hive and of course Hadoop itself natively support reading and writing data in Avro format. Many users seem to enjoy Avro but I have heard many complaints about not being able to conveniently read or write Avro files with command line tools – “Avro is nice, but why do I have to write Java or Python code just to quickly see what’s in a binary Avro file, or discover at least its Avro schema?”
To those users it comes as a surprise that Avro actually ships with exactly such command line tools but apparently they are not prominently advertised or documented as such. In this short article I will show a few hands-on examples on how to read, write, compress and convert data from and to binary Avro using Avro Tools 1.7.4.