Custom formats provide flexibility with the input, output, and compression formats that you can use with PowerExchange for HDFS.
Apart from the input, output, and compression formats that PowerExchange for HDFS supports, you can use custom formats to read, write, and compress files. You can use the custom formats that Hadoop supports.
You can specify the following custom formats:
Custom input format for complex file data objects
Custom output format for complex file data objects
Custom compression format for flat file and complex file data objects