Eric Baldeschwieler wrote:
An observation... this whole thread is about limits caused by type
safety. Interestingly, the other implementation of map-reduce does not
support types at all. Everything is a string.
So I agree that our departure from the paper is the problem. ;-)
A corollary is that one could simply use BytesWritable for all one's
keys and values, altering only one's WritableComparator implementation,
and one would not encounter this problem. The use of types in Hadoop is
thus an optional feature. One could even layer a different type system
on top of BytesWritable that exhibits the desired properties.
I'm comfortable letting this lie for a while. But I predict we've not
heard the last of it.
Owen seems to be picking it up, which is fine by me.
Doug
