What is the most used format to save data with type information I am exporting data from an SQL database and importing it into R. This is a two step process since I first (automatically) download the data to a hard drive and then import the file with R. 

Currently, I am using csv files to save the data. Everybody supports csv. But csv does not support type information. This makes it sometimes cumbersome to load a csv file because I must check all the column types. This seems unnecessary because the SQL database already specifies the types of the columns. 

I want to know if there is a broadly accepted file format to save data that also specifies the type of the columns.

Currently I am working with SQL databases, FME ETL'ing and R but I think this is an issue for every data tranfer.
Parquet and Avro both support data types (strings, integers, floats, etc). These are the primary file types used for "big data" projects, although your data doesn't have to be big. Apache Spark is able to read both with ease. Having said that, I'm a big fan of keeping data in a SQL database (e.g., MySQL or Postgres) because that is what they are built for. If you can't re-use the database you're pulling from, could you make your own database locally or on a separate server? I would try using a relational database until your data exceeds 50 GB (an arbitrarily "somewhat large" size), and then I would use Avro or Parquet.