By default Avro data files are not compressed, but it is generally advisable to enable compression to reduce disk usage and increase read and write performance. Avro data files support Deflate and Snappy compression. Snappy is faster, while Deflate is slightly more compact.

You do not need to do any additional configuration to read a compressed Avro data file rather than an uncompressed one. However, to write an Avro data file you need to specify the type of compression to use. How you specify compression depends on the component being used, as explained in the sections below.