Details
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Improvement
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Status: Resolved
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Major
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Resolution: Won't Fix
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0.2.0
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None
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None
Description
Pig would like to use the new Hadoop Avro serialization package to pass data between MR jobs, and eventually between Pig and UDFs that are not written in Java. Avro will not be supporting the float data type, but only double (see AVRO-17). Pig currently support both float and double. Double is the default floating point type (so if the user says x + 1.0, 1.0 is taken to be a double, not a float). Float was initially included in the list of Pig types because Hadoop supported it as one of the Writable types, and we were trying to make sure all of Hadoop's writable types could be represented in Pig.
In practice we do not see anyone using the float type. In order to be able to easily use Avro I propose dropping the float type.
Please speak up if you are using the float type and you have a compelling reason not to use double.