[CRUNCH-128] Allow one stage of an MR pipeline to depend on another target being created

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.5.0
• Assignee: Josh Wills
• Reporter: Josh Wills
• Created: 11/Dec/12 07:17
• Updated: 22/Feb/13 06:57
• Resolved: 08/Jan/13 04:29

Description

There are a couple of problems (e.g., mapside-joins, total orderings, etc.) where we need to guarantee that one PCollection has been written to the FileSystem before another MapReduce pipeline that depends on that file is allowed to run. This doesn't fit cleanly into the current set of abstractions for Crunch, which is why we force pipelines to execute via the run command to guarantee that the files have been created before the second stage is run.

We should add the ability for a particular PCollection to require that a SourceTarget instance has been created before it can be executed, and the planner should incorporate this information into the MR pipeline planning process.