Choosing the Right File Format for Big Data: A Comparison of Parquet, JSON, ORC, Avro, and CSV

Introduction How you store your data is a critical component of data engineering, as they determine the speed, efficiency, and compatibility of data storage and retrieval. Lets have a look at some of the popular file formats: Parquet, JSON, ORC, Avro, and CSV. We’ll compare their pros and cons, performance differences between reading and writing, and the importance of predicate pushdown and projection pushdown. What is Predicate pushdown and Projection pushdown? Predicate pushdown and projection pushdown are two performance optimisation techniques used in big data processing. They allow query engines to reduce the amount of data that needs to be processed by pushing down filter conditions and column projections to the storage layer.