What CSV is
CSV is a text file where each line is a row and commas separate the fields. There is no type system, no formatting and no second sheet. Every value is text until something downstream decides otherwise.
Almost every database, analytics tool and spreadsheet can read and write it, which is why exports default to it.
What Avro Schema is
An Avro schema describes a record: its name and its typed fields. It is the contract, not the data.
Kafka pipelines and anything in the Hadoop family.
What changes when you convert CSV to Avro Schema
Reading CSV means deciding three things the file does not state: which character separates fields, how quotes work, and what encoding the bytes are in. Tablizer sniffs the delimiter from the first few lines, handles quoted fields containing commas and newlines, and reads the file as UTF-8.
Types are inferred per column from the values present. Any column with a gap in it becomes a union with null, because a reader rejects a record whose non-nullable field is missing.
What carries over from CSV to Avro Schema
One property of the CSV has no home in Avro, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.
Avro wants a type for each column, and CSV does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
Avro has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.