What TSV is
TSV is CSV with tabs instead of commas. Because tabs almost never appear inside a value, quoting is rarely needed and the files are easier to read by eye.
Bioinformatics, log processing, and anyone who has copied a block of cells out of a spreadsheet: the clipboard format is TSV.
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 TSV to Avro Schema
The tab is unambiguous, so there is no delimiter to guess. This is the most reliable of the delimited formats to read.
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 TSV to Avro Schema
One property of the TSV has no home in Avro, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.
Avro wants a type for each column, and TSV 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.