Data formats supported for ingestion

Learn about the various data and compression formats supported for ingestion.

Data ingestion adds data to a table and makes it available for query. For all ingestion methods, other than ingest-from-query, the data must be in one of the supported formats. The following table lists and describes the formats that are supported for data ingestion.

To learn why ingestion might fail, see Ingestion failures. and Ingestion error codes in Azure Data Explorer.

FormatExtensionDescription
ApacheAvro.avroAn Avro format that supports logical types. Supported compression codecs: null, deflate, and snappy. The reader implementation of the apacheavro format is based on the official Apache Avro library. For details on ingesting Event Hubs Capture Avro files, see Ingesting Event Hubs Capture Avro files.
Avro.avroA legacy implementation of the Avro format based on the .NET library. Supported compression codecs: null and deflate. To use snappy, use the ApacheAvro data format.
AzMonStreamN/AAzure Monitor exports data in this format to Azure Event Hubs. This format is supported only by Azure Event Hubs.
CSV.csvA text file with comma-separated values (,). See RFC 4180: Common Format and MIME Type for Comma-Separated Values (CSV) Files.
JSON.jsonA text file with JSON objects delimited by \n or \r\n. See JSON Lines (JSONL).
MultiJSON.multijsonA text file with a JSON array of property bags (each representing a record), or any number of property bags delimited by whitespace, \n, or \r\n. Each property bag can span multiple lines.
ORC.orcAn ORC file.
Parquet.parquetA Parquet file.
PSV.psvA text file with pipe-separated values (|).
RAW.rawA text file whose entire contents are a single string value.
SCsv.scsvA text file with semicolon-separated values (;).
SOHsv.sohsvA text file with SOH-separated values. (SOH is ASCII codepoint 1; this format is used by Hive on HDInsight.)
TSV.tsvA text file with tab-separated values (\t).
TSVE.tsvA text file with tab-separated values (\t). A backslash character (\) is used for escaping.
TXT.txtA text file with lines delimited by \n. Empty lines are skipped.
W3CLOGFILE.logWeb log file format standardized by the W3C.

For more information about ingesting data by using the json or multijson formats, see Ingest JSON formats.

Supported data compression formats

Compress blobs and files with these algorithms:

CompressionExtension
gzip.gz
zip.zip

Indicate compression by appending the extension to the blob or file name.

For example:

  • MyData.csv.zip indicates a blob or file formatted as CSV, compressed with zip (archive or single file).
  • MyData.json.gz indicates a blob or file formatted as JSON, compressed with gzip.

Blob or file names that include only the compression extension (for example, MyData.zip) are also supported. In this case, specify the file format as an ingestion property because it can’t be inferred.