Has anyone discussed the possibility of having built-in support for a date/time stamp data type in Avro? I think it'd be helpful, since dates and timestamps are often used as keys in processing map/reduce data (and in RPC systems). It's unpleasant to have to write code that converts longs or strings into dates or timestamps. Minimally, it would be useful to allow generating date/time stamps from long timestamps in the client APIs various language code and to have support for working with Dates in the Java reflection API.
I'd like to get feedback from others if they'd also like to see support for date/time data types in Avro. It seems like a generally useful feature that would be worth adding with a patch. Thanks, Ron Ron Bodkin CEO Think Big Analytics m: +1 (415) 509-2895
