On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Jonathan Coveney <[email protected]> wrote: > Imagine I use Avro to serialize an object (without loss of generality let's > say an array of longs). I'm curious if it is possible to compare those > arrays without deserializing... ie look at the bytes in memory or on disk, > and do the comparison based on those bytes (ie the raw comparison that > Hadoop does in the shuffle sort). > > I poked around the documentation but wasn't sure where to look.
Yes, this is possible. The Java method that does this is BinaryData#compare(). http://avro.apache.org/docs/current/api/java/org/apache/avro/io/BinaryData.html#compare(byte[], int, byte[], int, org.apache.avro.Schema) Doug
