On Feb 12, 2008, at 12:21 PM, Yuri Pradkin wrote:
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?
Most users don't want to fworry about the serialization of the output inside the reduce. That is better left to the output format, which is already doing the record layout.
That said, you could still do it quite easily. Just have the reduce output BytesWritable keys and values and have the OutputFormat write them instead.
-- Owen
