Formats Overview

Formats define how Ververica serializes and deserializes data when reading from or writing to external systems through Connectors. The format determines how rows are encoded on the wire or on disk, as JSON, Avro, Parquet, and so on.

The most common formats are JSON and Avro for messaging systems like Kafka, Parquet and ORC for data lake formats, and Debezium JSON for change data capture sources. Confluent Avro is used for Avro data with a Confluent Schema Registry.

Each format page covers configuration options, type mapping between the format and Flink SQL data types, and any deployment-specific notes. For formats not listed here, see Custom Formats (/formats/custom-formats) for building your own.