[IMPALA-11785] impala-shell should produce a warning if Thrift's fastbinary package isn't working

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: Impala 4.3.0
• Fix Version/s: Impala 4.3.0
• Component/s: Clients
• Epic Color: ghx-label-11
• Assignee: Joe McDonnell
• Reporter: Joe McDonnell
• Created: 09/Dec/22 21:24
• Updated: 23/May/23 16:36
• Resolved: 23/May/23 16:36

Description

Thrift's fastbinary package accelerates the binary protocol for Thrift with native code, and it can make a large difference in performance for impala-shell (and other clients). Differences in compilers or other build-time discrepancies can cause it to fail to load. When that happens, it falls back to the non-accelerated Python code.

Currently, there is no warning when it falls back to the non-accelerated code. We should change impala-shell to issue a warning in this case. One way to do that is to try to import thrift.protocol.fastbinary and issue a warning if it fails to import.

try:
  import thrift.protocol.fastbinary
  print("Successfully imported fastbinary")
except:
  print("Could not import fastbinary")