By default Hive supports text file format, however hive also supports below binary formats.
Sequence Files, Avro Data files, RCFiles, ORC files, Parquet files
Sequence files: General binary format. splittable, compressible and row oriented. a typical example can be. if we have lots of small file, we may use sequence file as a container, where file name can be a key and content could stored as value. it support compression which enables huge gain in performance.
Avro datafiles: Same as Sequence file splittable, compressible and row oriented except support of schema evolution and multilingual binding support.
RCFiles: Record columnar file, it’s a column oriented storage file. it breaks table in row split. in each split stores that value of first row in first column and followed sub subsequently.
ORC Files: Optimized Record Columnar files
