[jira] [Commented] (HIVE-13275) Add a toString method to BytesRefArrayWritable

["Harsh J (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-13275?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=15192388#comment-15192388 ] 

Harsh J commented on HIVE-13275:
--------------------------------

A couple of caveats though:
# While RCFile may natively support columns with newline characters in their data, the toString representation for use in Hadoop Streaming will likely not work well with that (cause of text format)
# If the bytes are encoded in any form other than simple text representations in future, such as in Avro, Protobuf, etc., the toString representation will not be directly useful anymore

> Add a toString method to BytesRefArrayWritable
> ----------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: HIVE-13275
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-13275
>             Project: Hive
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: File Formats, Serializers/Deserializers
>    Affects Versions: 1.1.0
>            Reporter: Harsh J
>            Assignee: Harsh J
>            Priority: Trivial
>         Attachments: HIVE-13275.000.patch
>
>
> RCFileInputFormat cannot be used externally for Hadoop Streaming today cause Streaming generally relies on the K/V pairs to be able to emit text representations (via toString()).
> Since BytesRefArrayWritable has no toString() methods, the usage of the RCFileInputFormat causes object representation prints which are not useful.
> Also, unlike SequenceFiles, RCFiles store multiple "values" per row (i.e. an array), so its important to output them in a valid/parseable manner, as opposed to choosing a simple joining delimiter over the string representations of the inner elements.
> I propose adding a standardised CSV formatting of the array data, such that users of Streaming can then parse the results in their own script. Since we have OpenCSV as a dependency already, we can make use of it for this purpose.



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