[PARQUET-194] Provide callback to allow user defined key-value metadata merging strategy

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Reopened
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 1.6.0
• Component/s: parquet-mr
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Cheng Lian
• Created: 26/Feb/15 05:20
• Updated: 23/Jun/24 03:27

Description

When merging footers, Parquet doesn't know how to merge conflicting user defined key-value metadata entries, and simply throws. It would be better to provide callbacks to let users define metadata merging strategies.

For example, in Spark SQL, we store our own schema information in Parquet files as key-value metadata (similar to parquet-avro). While trying to add schema merging support for reading Parquet files with different but compatible schemas, InitContext.getMergedKeyValueMetaData throws because we have different Spark SQL schemas stored in different Parquet data files. Thus, we have to overwrite ParquetInputFormat and merge the schema within getSplits, which is kinda hacky and inconvenient.

Issue Links

• is blocked by: PARQUET-211 Release parquet-mr 1.6.0