Avro is Row oriented like said before, you should see it ine the categories of Thrift, Protobuf. Albeit a lot better in flexibility. But he gist of it is that it's a Serialization format for than a storage format, which Parquet is. Usually, when using Kafka or the confluent platform, I'd use Avro, and for long term storage and analytics Avro isn't really suited. Instead use Parquet or ORC if you're using Hive. With things like Spark, Impala or Presto, aggregations queries for ad hoc analytics are an order of magnitude more efficient and faste with Parquet than with Avro.