Agreed. Hope you don't mind a plug here for ADAM, a genomics analysis platform with specialized file formats built using Apache Avro, Apache Spark and Parquet.

Agreed. Hope you don't mind a plug here for ADAM, a genomics analysis platform with specialized file formats built using Apache Avro, Apache Spark and Parquet. https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam