Avro.NET

Fast Avro de/serializer for .NET

Benefits

Introducing Avro to the projects brings three main benefits:

• Reduction of data size and storage cost
• Decrease of the communication time and the network traffic between microservices
• Increased security - the data is not visible in plain text format

Features

	AvroConvert	Apache.Avro	Newtonsoft.Json
Rapid serialization	✔	✔	✔
Easy to use	✔	X	✔
Built-in compression	✔	✔	X
Low memory allocation	✔	✔	✔
Support for C# data structures: Dictionary, List, DateTime...	✔	X	✔
Support for compression codecs	Deflate & GZip	Deflate	X
Readable schema of data structure	✔	✔	✔
Data encryption	✔	✔	X

Benchmark

Results of BenchmarkDotNet:

Converter	Request Time [ms]	Allocated Memory [MB]	Compressed Size [kB]
Json	642.1	151.45	6044
Avro	254.3	71.27	2623
Json_Gzip	194.7	85.45	514
Avro_Gzip	131.5	64.15	104

Docs

Avro format combines readability of JSON and data compression of binary serialization. Apache Wiki Apache Avro format documentation

Code samples

• Serialization

 byte[] avroObject = AvroConvert.Serialize(object yourObject);

• Deserialization

CustomClass deserializedObject = AvroConvert.Deserialize<CustomClass>(byte[] avroObject);

• Read schema from Avro object

string schemaInJsonFormat = AvroConvert.GetSchema(byte[] avroObject)

• Deserialization of large collection of Avro objects one by one

using (var reader = AvroConvert.OpenDeserializer<CustomClass>(new MemoryStream(avroObject)))
{
    while (reader.HasNext())
    {
        var item = reader.ReadNext();
        // process item
    }
}

• Generation of C# models from Avro file or schema

  string resultModel = AvroConvert.GenerateModel(avroObject);

• Conversion of Avro to JSON directly

  var resultJson = AvroConvert.Avro2Json(avroObject);