[jira] Work started: (HADOOP-372) should allow to specify different inputformat classes for different input dirs for Map/Reduce jobs

["Owen O'Malley (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

     [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-372?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]

Work on HADOOP-372 started by Owen O'Malley.

> should allow to specify different inputformat classes for different input dirs for Map/Reduce jobs
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: HADOOP-372
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-372
>             Project: Hadoop
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>          Components: mapred
>    Affects Versions: 0.4.0
>         Environment: all
>            Reporter: Runping Qi
>            Assignee: Owen O'Malley
>
> Right now, the user can specify multiple input directories for a map reduce job. 
> However, the files under all the directories are assumed to be in the same format, 
> with the same key/value classes. This proves to be  a serious limit in many situations. 
> Here is an example. Suppose I have three simple tables: 
> one has URLs and their rank values (page ranks), 
> another has URLs and their classification values, 
> and the third one has the URL meta data such as crawl status, last crawl time, etc. 
> Suppose now I need a job to generate a list of URLs to be crawled next. 
> The decision depends on the info in all the three tables.
> Right now, there is no easy way to accomplish this.
> However, this job can be done if the framework allows to specify different inputformats for different input dirs.
> Suppose my three tables are in the following directory respectively: rankTable, classificationTable. and metaDataTable. 
> If we extend JobConf class with the following method (as Owen suggested to me):
>     addInputPath(aPath, anInputFormatClass, anInputKeyClass, anInputValueClass)
> Then I can specify my job as follows:
>     addInputPath(rankTable, SequenceFileInputFormat.class, UTF8.class, DoubleWritable.class)
>     addInputPath(classificationTable, TextInputFormat.class, UTF8,class, UTF8.class)
>     addInputPath(metaDataTable, SequenceFileInputFormat.class, UTF8.class, MyRecord.class)
> If an input directory is added through the current API, it will have the same meaning as it is now. 
> Thus this extension will not affect any applications that do not need this new feature.
> It is relatively easy for the M/R framework to create an appropriate record reader for a map task based on the above information.
> And that is the only change needed for supporting this extension.

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