For the export at GSOC we had a streaming REST interface based on akka-streams. It is used to get the data into other systems based on spark for more complex analysis.
Of course you also lose the compression, but the target system is typically only interested in a small subset of the data.
While HDF5 is good when you manage the whole system, it is always tricky for sharing data with other people so we are also using SQLite. We lose the compression but it is very easy to share and people are more familiar with it.