Major Description
The Apache shade plugin allows maven builds to create an uber jar that contains dependencies in the project. In addition, the shade plugin allows you to relocate dependencies into a private namespace to prevent class conflicts on shared class paths. Avro does not support relocation.
All generated Avro objects contain a string field named SCHEMA$ which serves as the authority for the class namespace. When the shade plugin updates the byte code to relocate the class, it doesn't alter the SCHEMA$ string. This break Avro use of reflection since the namespace in SCHEMA$ points to an incorrect location.
I spoke with Doug about the issue and he was kind enough to provide a quick hack in order to fix this issue. The hack is to check for mismatches between the byte code and the SCHEMA$ and, when they don't match, to defer to the byte code. I'll attach Doug's patch to this Jira.