[MAPREDUCE-1462] Enable context-specific and stateful serializers in MapReduce

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: task
• Assignee: Owen O'Malley
• Reporter: Owen O'Malley
• Created: 05/Feb/10 07:36
• Updated: 07/Jul/12 12:56

Description

Although the current serializer framework is powerful, within the context of a job it is limited to picking a single serializer for a given class. Additionally, Avro generic serialization can make use of additional configuration/state such as the schema. (Most other serialization frameworks including Writable, Jute/Record IO, Thrift, Avro Specific, and Protocol Buffers only need the object's class name to deserialize the object.)

With the goal of keeping the easy things easy and maintaining backwards compatibility, we should be able to allow applications to use context specific (eg. map output key) serializers in addition to the current type based ones that handle the majority of the cases. Furthermore, we should be able to support serializer specific configuration/metadata in a type safe manor without cluttering up the base API with a lot of new methods that will confuse new users.

Issue Links

• is blocked by: HADOOP-6685 Change the generic serialization framework API to use serialization-specific bytes instead of Map<String,String> for configuration
• is related to: MAPREDUCE-1183 Serializable job components: Mapper, Reducer, InputFormat, OutputFormat et al
• is related to: MAPREDUCE-1126 shuffle should use serialization to get comparator