Hi Matt,

You may know this already, but for general reference:

There is an Avro API for concatenating Avro files (and potentially compressing 
them) in Java.  Additionally, there is a command line tool for concatenating in 
avro-tools.jar.

-Scott

On 5/26/11 7:46 AM, "Matt Pouttu-Clarke" 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 
wrote:

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the response.  It turns out that in part of our code we were 
concatenating smaller files into larger files using i/o streams.  This used to 
work fine when the files were JSON text files.  However, we learned that hard 
way that with Avro you cannot concatenate files in the traditional sense.  
Unless you parse the inputs and merge them using the Avro APIs you get the 
‘Invalid sync’ error when attempting to read the cat file.  Obviously in 
retrospect this has to do with the JSON schema at the beginning of each file 
not being valid in the middle of the concatenated file.

The reason why we didn’t see this on our Apache Hadoop dev cluster was the data 
size was smaller and the concatenation was 1-to-1.

Maybe a better error message would have led us to this conclusion sooner?  
Other than that it’s not really Avro’s problem.

-Matt

On 5/25/11 4:40 PM, "Scott Carey" <[email protected]> wrote:

The svn change you note is from AVRO-160.  Avro's file format changed between 
Avro 1.2 and 1.3.
Recent versions (Avro 1.5.x and perhaps 1.4.1) have a file reader class for 
Avro 1.2 that is separate in case old format files need to be read.

We weren't aware of anyone using the 1.2 format at the time we changed (see 
AVRO-160).

I'm not sure your error below is due to that change however.  Does the error 
below occur before any records are retrieved? or part-way through after some 
have been accessed?



On 5/25/11 2:34 PM, "Matt Pouttu-Clarke" <[email protected]> 
wrote:

Getting this error when reading an Avro file on Amazon EMR Hadoop.  Does not 
occur on any recent Apache Hadoop build.

Exception org.apache.avro.AvroRuntimeException: java.io.IOException: Invalid 
sync!
org.apache.avro.AvroRuntimeException: java.io.IOException: Invalid sync!
    at org.apache.avro.file.DataFileStream.hasNext(DataFileStream.java:176)
    at Abc.readAvroFile(Abc.java:28)
    at Abc.main(Abc.java:65)
Caused by: java.io.IOException: Invalid sync!
    at org.apache.avro.file.DataFileStream.nextRawBlock(DataFileStream.java:258)
    at org.apache.avro.file.DataFileStream.hasNext(DataFileStream.java:164)
    ... 2 more

Source code that throws the Invalid sync! exception indicates low level IO 
problem:
{code}
244      DataBlock nextRawBlock(DataBlock reuse) throws IOException {
245        if (!hasNextBlock()) {
246          throw new NoSuchElementException();
247        }
248        if (reuse == null || reuse.data.length < (int) blockSize) {
249          reuse = new DataBlock(blockRemaining, (int) blockSize);
250        } else {
251          reuse.numEntries = blockRemaining;
252          reuse.blockSize = (int)blockSize;
253        }
254        // throws if it can't read the size requested
255        vin.readFixed(reuse.data, 0, reuse.blockSize);
256        vin.readFixed(syncBuffer);
257        if (!Arrays.equals(syncBuffer, sync))
258          throw new IOException("Invalid sync!");
259        availableBlock = false;
260        return reuse;
261      }
{code}

Looks like this commit from Doug Cutting removed those error messages:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00218.html

Anyone have any clue as to what could cause these errors?

Thanks,
Matt


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