Hi, I agree with your analysis about Decimals.
Something similar has already gone into patch-available previously, but held back https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ORC-209 This is somewhat stuck behind the Vector type system evolving support for this https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-17235 + https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-17433 That works only for Text formats in Hive right now, hope that bolsters your case for implementing it in ORC. Definite +1 on the DecimalStatistics impl, the String representation is the slowest part of the Decimal writer loop in Java (i.e for every row, toString + compare min/max). Cheers, Gopal On 4/10/18, 1:24 PM, "Wu Gang" <ust...@gmail.com> wrote: Hi, This is Gang Wu and I have proposed this in ORC-161 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ORC-161> but got no response therefore I put it here. Recently I have done some benchmarks between ORC and our proprietary file format. The result indicates that ORC does not have a good performance on decimal type. From the aforementioned discussion in this JIRA, I have a proposal for adding a new encoding approach for decimal type (I don't think adding another kind of decimal type is a good choose which may confuse users). My proposal works as follows: - As Hive already has precision and scale specified in the type, we can totally remove the SECONDARY stream which stores scale of each element currently. - Since 128-bit integer is used to represent a decimal value and RLE supports at most 64-bit integer, we have two cases here. - If precision <= 18, then the whole decimal value can be represented in a signed 64-bit integer. Therefore we only need a DATA stream and use signed integer RLE to encode it. - If precision > 18, then we need to use a signed 128-bit integer. A solution is to use a signed 64-bit integer to hold higher 64 bits and an unsigned 64-bit integer to hold the lower 64 bits (C++ version is exactly doing the same thing). In this way, we can use DATA stream with signed integer RLE to store higher 64 bits and SECONDARY stream with unsigned integer RLE to store lower 64 bits. - DecimalStatistics uses string type to store min/max/sum. We may also replace them with combination of sint64 and uint64 as above to represent a 128-bit integer. This can help save a lot of space. Any thoughts? Best, Gang
