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dhruba borthakur commented on HIVE-1071: ---------------------------------------- we could create a API in HDFS that concatenates a set of files into one file. The partial last block of each file will be zero filled, this is required because all the blocks (except the last block) in a single HDFS file should have the same size. once we have the above-mentioned HDFS API, then we can merge a bunch of RC files into one single file without doing much physical IO. The RC file format has to be such that it can safely ignore zero-filled areas in the middle of the file. Can it do this? > Making RCFile "concatenatable" to reduce the number of files of the output > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Key: HIVE-1071 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-1071 > Project: Hadoop Hive > Issue Type: Improvement > Reporter: Zheng Shao > > Hive automatically determine the number of reducers most of the time. > Sometimes, we create a lot of small files. > Hive has an option to "merge" those small files though a map-reduce job. > Dhruba has the idea which can fix it even faster: > if we can make RCFile concatenatable, then we can simply tell the namenode to > "merge" these files. > Pros: This approach does not do any I/O so it's faster. > Cons: We have to zero-fill the files to make sure they can be concatenated > (all blocks except the last have to be full HDFS blocks). -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - You can reply to this email to add a comment to the issue online.