Storing Null Values in Avro Files

Date: 2025-02-17

Apache Avro, a data serialization system, strictly enforces schemas, making null value handling challenging. Unlike JSON, Avro doesn't automatically support nulls. To include nulls, define fields using union types, combining "null" with the desired data type (e.g., ["null", "int"]). This article demonstrates a Java implementation using GenericRecord and DataFileWriter to write and read Avro files containing null values, ensuring schema compliance and efficient data handling. The example shows how to define a schema with nullable fields, create records with null values, write them to an Avro file, and then successfully read and display those null values.

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