[jira] [Created] (FLINK-5039) Avro GenericRecord support is broken

["Bruno Dumon (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Bruno Dumon created FLINK-5039:
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             Summary: Avro GenericRecord support is broken
                 Key: FLINK-5039
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-5039
             Project: Flink
          Issue Type: Bug
          Components: Batch Connectors and Input/Output Formats
    Affects Versions: 1.1.3
            Reporter: Bruno Dumon
            Priority: Minor


Avro GenericRecord support was introduced in FLINK-3691, but it seems like the GenericRecords are not properly (de)serialized.

This can be easily seen with a program like this:

{noformat}
  env.createInput(new AvroInputFormat<>(new Path("somefile.avro"), GenericRecord.class))
    .first(10)
    .print();
{noformat}

which will print records in which all fields have the same value:

{noformat}
{"foo": 1478628723066, "bar": 1478628723066, "baz": 1478628723066, ...}
{"foo": 1478628723179, "bar": 1478628723179, "baz": 1478628723179, ...}
{noformat}

If I'm not mistaken, the AvroInputFormat does essentially TypeExtractor.getForClass(GenericRecord.class), but GenericRecords are not POJOs.

Furthermore, each GenericRecord contains a pointer to the record schema. I guess the current naive approach will serialize this schema with each record, which is quite inefficient (the schema is typically more complex and much larger than the data). We probably need a TypeInformation and TypeSerializer specific to Avro GenericRecords, which could just use avro serialization.



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