In HCatalog, translation between the key, value pairs used by MapReduce and HCatRecord is done by StorageDriver classes. We are proposing to change this to use Hive's SerDe class to do this instead, dropping StorageDrivers. Reasons for this change, as well as design notes on how to do it and tasks it breaks down into are at https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HCATALOG-237
This is a significant change. As currently proposed, it is not backward compatible. We are doing this work on trunk, and plan to release it in HCatalog 0.4. Alan.
