Have you thought about extending schema resolution, so that an int or long can be promoted to a string? The string would be the ASCII decimal representation of the number, I expect. Similarly, an enum could be promoted to its symbol (as a string).
I’ve seen this sort of thing used for evolving a schema: you start out thinking a number is all you need, and then discover you need a richer format. Or vice-versa. JavaScript and some other languages do this, and people mostly like it. They also do other conversions that I don’t suggest for Avro, such as string to number and float to string. (The string representation of a float depends on your locale.) I’d be happy to put this into JIRA, if you think that’s appropriate. - John Kristian
