This chapter describes the functions used to manage the Avro data format. Avro provides the ability to describe the schema used for the value portion of a key-value pair. You describe this schema in a flat-text file using Javascript Object Notation (JSON). A trivial example of an Avro schema would be:

{
     "type": "record",
     "namespace": "com.example",
     "name": "FullName",
     "fields": [
       { "name": "first", "type": "string" },
       { "name": "last", "type": "string" }
     ]
} 

Once you create your schema, you provide it to both the store and to your client code. You can then efficiently serialize and deserialize the data stored in the record's value.

For more information about Avro, see the Oracle NoSQL Database Getting Started Guide. For information on using the Avro C API, see http://avro.apache.org/docs/current/api/c/index.html.