Details
Description
The need for this improvement arose when working with large ancillary MapFile-s (essentially used as external dictionaries). For each invokation of map() / reduce() it was necessary to perform several look-ups in these MapFile-s, and in case of sparsely populated key-space the cost of finding that a key is absent was too high.
This patch implements a subclass of MapFile that creates a Bloom filter from all keys, so that accurate tests for absence of keys can be performed quickly and with 100% accuracy.
Writer.append() operations update a DynamicBloomFilter, which is then serialized when the Writer is closed. This filter is loaded in memory when a Reader is created. Reader.get() operation first checks the filter for the key membership, and if the key is absent it immediately returns null without doing any further IO.