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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HDFS-3689?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=14103930#comment-14103930
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Andrey Stepachev commented on HDFS-3689:
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May it is more convent to implement sparse files
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file).
Improved formats like ORC and Parquet can benefit from such files and use
sparseness for efficient merging.
To prevent from reading sparse files with old applications, they should feed
some flag (like ALLOW_SPARSE) to open method, error will be generated
otherwise. Reading sparse parts can generate no IO, just return zeros.
> Add support for variable length block
> -------------------------------------
>
> Key: HDFS-3689
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HDFS-3689
> Project: Hadoop HDFS
> Issue Type: New Feature
> Components: datanode, hdfs-client, namenode
> Affects Versions: 3.0.0
> Reporter: Suresh Srinivas
> Assignee: Suresh Srinivas
> Attachments: HDFS-3689.000.patch, HDFS-3689.001.patch
>
>
> Currently HDFS supports fixed length blocks. Supporting variable length block
> will allow new use cases and features to be built on top of HDFS.
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