Hi, I'm relatively new to Hadoop and I have what I hope is a simple question:
I don't understand why the key/value assumption is preserved AFTER the reduce operation, in other words why the output of a reducer is expected as <key,value> instead of arbitrary, possibly binary bytes? Why can't OutputCollector just give those raw bytes to the RecordWriter and have it make sense of them as it pleases, or just dump them to a file? This seems like an unnecessary restriction to me, at least at the first glance. Thanks, -Yuri
