Details
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New Feature
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Status: Patch Available
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Minor
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
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Implemented Schema#isSuperset, Schema#unify, and a Tool for generating unified Schemas from avro data files.
Description
From my post on the mailing list, and Doug's response:
On 05/05/2011 10:29 AM, Joe Crobak wrote:
> We've recently come across a situation where we have two data files with
> different schemas that we'd like to process together using
> GenericDatumReader. One schema is promotable to the other, but not vice
> versa. We'd like to programmatically determine which of the schemas to
> use. I did a brief look through javadoc and tests, and I couldn't find
> any examples of checking if one schema is promotable to the other. Has
> anyone else come across this?
>
> For some context, we're considering patching AvroStorage [1] to remove
> the assumption that all files have the same schema. In our case, our
> schema has evolved in that a field that was an int was promoted to a long.A boolean method that tells you if one schema is promotable to another
would work in this case, but would not help in cases where, e.g.,
different fields had changed in different versions. For example, in
branched development, two branches might each add a distinct symbol to
an enum. So I think you might be better off with a method that, given
two schemas, returns their superset, a schema that can read data written
by either.Such a method does not yet exist in Avro, but should not be difficult to
add. Please file an issue in Jira if this sounds of interest.Doug
I think it would be useful to have both of the methods that Doug mentioned in some sort of schema utils class.