[ddlatham]

There are some use cases where record-level self description is very useful. For example when dealing with small records in a database or NoSQL store or message queue that could be written by multiple versions of applications. To cover that case well with Avro where records are not self describing really requires something like a schema registry and embedding a schema id with each record (e.g. http://www.confluent.io/blog/schema-registry-kafka-stream-pr... ).