[HADOOP-1722] Make streaming to handle non-utf8 byte array

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.0.2, 0.21.0
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Release Note: Streaming allows binary (or other non-UTF8) streams.
• Assignee: Klaas Bosteels Assign to me
• Reporter: Runping Qi
• Created: 16/Aug/07 14:33
• Updated: 21/Feb/13 17:09
• Resolved: 13/Feb/09 04:13

Description

Right now, the streaming framework expects the output sof the steam process (mapper or reducer) are line
oriented UTF-8 text. This limit makes it impossible to use those programs whose outputs may be non-UTF-8
(international encoding, or maybe even binary data). Streaming can overcome this limit by introducing a simple
encoding protocol. For example, it can allow the mapper/reducer to hexencode its keys/values,
the framework decodes them in the Java side.
This way, as long as the mapper/reducer executables follow this encoding protocol,
they can output arabitary bytearray and the streaming framework can handle them.

Issue Links

• is related to: HADOOP-6901 Parsing large compressed files with HADOOP-1722 spawns multiple mappers per file
• relates to: MAPREDUCE-606 Implement a binary input/output format for Streaming
• relates to: HIVE-708 Add TypedBytes SerDe for transform
• relates to: MAPREDUCE-5018 Support raw binary data with Hadoop streaming