Why Your Data Pipeline Hates CSV - And what to use instead

Using CSVs in production environments creates significant performance bottlenecks. While they are easy to use for small tasks, they lack schema enforcement and efficient compression.

I have written an article titled "Why Your Data Pipeline Hates CSV - And what to use instead," a technical guide published by Towards Data Engineering that compares four superior alternatives for scalable pipelines:

1. Parquet: Optimized for columnar storage and large-scale analytical queries.
2. Avro: A row-based format designed for high-write streaming and Kafka pipelines.
3. JSON: The standard format for semi-structured data and API interactions.
4. ORC: A specialized columnar format for Hive and Hadoop ecosystems.

Why Your Data Pipeline Hates CSV — And What to Use Instead