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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1402?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13963146#comment-13963146
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Ryan Blue commented on AVRO-1402:
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bq. 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.
I think there is a use case that avro needs to care about: `BigDecimal` is used
to avoid floating point error, but not just for money where scale is almost
always 2. If I'm storing precise measurements, I could end up with different
incoming scales from different equipment used to take the measurement. This
works just fine up until the `BigDecimal` is stored in avro, at which point
avro would throw an exception and force the caller to mutate the data, if avro
forces data points to have the same scale.
There are real-world cases where this happens. GPS data comes to mind, where
newer receivers have better location resolution and it's important to keep the
most precise measurement taken.
> 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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