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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1402?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13963029#comment-13963029
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Tom White commented on AVRO-1402:
---------------------------------
There have been objections to the approach implemented here on the basis that
there’s no a clear use case for storing decimals with different scales in the
same field. So here’s another idea. Rather than adding new types into
GenericData, provide helper code to make it easy for applications to use
decimals with some agreed upon schemas. To avoid the problems with unique names
we could go back to the logical type approach:
{code}
{"type":"bytes", "logicalType":"decimal", "scale":"2”}
{code}
We’d then have code like
{code}
// write
Schema schema = DecimalHelper.schema(2);
BigDecimal decimal = new BigDecimal("12.45");
GenericDatumWriter<ByteBuffer> writer = new
GenericDatumWriter<ByteBuffer>(schema, GenericData.get());
writer.write(DecimalHelper.toByteBuffer(decimal), encoder);
// read
int scale = DecimalHelper.getScale(schema);
GenericDatumReader<ByteBuffer> reader = new
GenericDatumReader<ByteBuffer>(schema, schema, GenericData.get());
ByteBuffer buffer = reader.read(null, decoder);
BigDecimal readDecimal = DecimalHelper.fromByteBuffer(buffer, scale);
{code}
If we did this we would revert the patch in this JIRA, since there’s no benefit
in having both approaches. Date/time could be implemented in the same way.
Also, the work on interchangeable memory-models (AVRO-1469) might provide a
more flexible approach for supporting more in-memory types (like BigDecimal) in
the future.
> Support for DECIMAL type
> ------------------------
>
> Key: AVRO-1402
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1402
> Project: Avro
> Issue Type: New Feature
> Affects Versions: 1.7.5
> Reporter: Mariano Dominguez
> Assignee: Tom White
> Priority: Minor
> Labels: Hive
> Fix For: 1.7.7
>
> Attachments: AVRO-1402.patch, AVRO-1402.patch, AVRO-1402.patch,
> AVRO-1402.patch, UnixEpochRecordMapping.patch
>
>
> Currently, Avro does not seem to support a DECIMAL type or equivalent.
> http://avro.apache.org/docs/1.7.5/spec.html#schema_primitive
> Adding DECIMAL support would be particularly interesting when converting
> types from Avro to Hive, since DECIMAL is already a supported data type in
> Hive (0.11.0).
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