[SPARK-49082] Support type promotion/widening for Avro readers

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 4.0.0
• Fix Version/s: 4.0.0
• Component/s: Input/Output
• Labels: pull-request-available
• Assignee: Jackie Zhang
• Reporter: Jackie Zhang
• Created: 01/Aug/24 18:50
• Updated: 07/Aug/24 14:26
• Resolved: 07/Aug/24 14:26

Description

Similar to the ask in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-40876, we should be able to enable type promotion/widening for Avro readers - i.e. we should be able to read back Avro data encoded in a narrower type using a wider Spark schema type.

We should support the following:

• Int -> Long
• Float -> Double
• Int -> Double
• Date -> TimestampNTZ (Timestamp without timezone only as a date has no timezone information)
• Decimal with higher precision (already supported in non-vectorized reader)

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #47582