Alan is right. Its meant to help with disambiguation when the column name is 
the same across relations. In Alan's example, if you had u instead of x in B, 
then the columns in the C (join) would be (A::u, v, B::u, y). A::v and B::y are 
also valid column names.

Santhosh 

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Gates [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 8:58 AM
To: [email protected]
Cc: Santhosh Srinivasan
Subject: Re: What is the canonicalname field in a Schema object used for?

Santosh is the best person to answer this, as he wrote that code.  But, IIRC 
its purpose is to store the "full" name of a column after cogroups and joins.  
For example,

A = load 'foo' as (u, v);
B = load 'bar' as (x, y);
C = join A by u, B by x;

I believe the canonicalname will now hold A::u, etc.

Alan.

On Nov 16, 2011, at 7:25 PM, Jonathan Coveney wrote:

> If you do:
> 
> Schema s1 = Utils.getSchemaFromString( 
> "b:bag{t:tuple(name:chararray,age:int)}");
> 
> 
> then it will all be -1'd out. It doesn't seem to be used anywhere, I 
> was just wondering, since in other case, it will be populated properly.
> 
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Jon

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