https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Support-Questions/Best-Practice-JSON-to-Avro-data-type-preserving/m-p/148372#M110898 <P>Hi All, What is the best approach to convert a JSON to AVRO preserving the source datatypes. My source JSON has a field with timestamp (value would look like 2017-01-26T00:00:00-05:00) which I need to eventually insert to a hive table with column type timestamp. When I infer the schema, I get String for the timestamp field. Is there some pre-formatting that I can do on the timestamp field so that it gets inferred as timestamp field. Current flow is as below - JSON&gt;&gt;AVRO(infer/manually add schema)&gt;&gt;Streaming Insert to hive</P> Fri, 27 Jan 2017 01:37:10 GMT arunak 2017-01-27T01:37:10Z