Minor Description
It's currently not possible to add an arbitrary property on a record field. e.g., in the following example, although the schema parses fine, the "alias" property gets thrown away:
{
"name": "KVPair",
"type": "record",
"fields" : [
,
{"name": "values", "type": "bytes"} ]
}
I had read the Avro spec and thought this was actually allowed ("Attributes not defined in this document are permitted as metadata, but must not affect the format of serialized data.") but it appears that such additional properties are only allowed at the schema level, not at the field level too.
This would be a really useful feature to have, as it would allow the user to define meta-data on a field. Currently the only other way to achieve the same behavior would be to do some kind of hack using the field's "doc" attribute, which would be rather ugly.