The nice thing about Avro - besides being more and more popular - is, that it embeds the schema (layout) of the data rows. Avro also compresses the files. In my opinion this is cool for backing up your data, but also for the exchange of data between different systems, as you have the data types defined within the file.
Explanations are in the readme file and there is also a code sample.
Carpe Diem.