Parquet is a great columnar format, and Avro is great for schema evolution. But they're not that easy to work with directly. To this day there isn't a decent Parquet viewer to do adhoc data viewing.

SQLite on the other hand has a lightweight SQL REPL that can be invoked from the command line.

Spark can work with SQLite via JDBC, though obviously it isn't as native as Parquet. Between SQLite and Parquet, I might pick Parquet under most circumstances.

But it seems to me SQLite ought to at least be a better option than CSV for Spark jobs (less work needed to do type inference, predicate pushdowns are trivial, etc.)