There are a couple other index formats that could apply. You can seek to a sync marker and scan from there. For example Avro files can be a target for Elephant Twin (http://www.slideshare.net/squarecog/flexible-insitu-indexing-for-hadoop-via -elephant-twin ; http://gitrep.com/users/twitter/repos/elephant-twin).
However, that is a light-weight index for marking which blocks have records that match the index, it does not locate the exact record. From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Reply-To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Monday, July 1, 2013 10:26 AM To: user <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Random access in an avro file Thanks for the reply Doug. Out of curiosity, is maintaining sync markers while writing the file and then passing these markers to the readers while reading not a good way to achieve random access in avro? Atleast that's what my understanding from reading the javadoc[1] was, which could be flawed. [1] http://avro.apache.org/docs/1.3.3/api/java/org/apache/avro/file/DataFileWrit er.html#sync() On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Doug Cutting <[email protected]> wrote: > Avro data files do not generally support random access. > > SortedKeyValueFile supports random access by key. > > http://avro.apache.org/docs/current/api/java/org/apache/avro/hadoop/file/Sorte > dKeyValueFile.Reader.html > > From the documentation: > > "The SortedKeyValueFile is a directory with two files, named 'data' > and 'index'. The 'data' file is an ordinary Avro container file with > records. Each record has exactly two fields, 'key' and 'value'. The > keys are sorted lexicographically. The 'index' file is a small Avro > container file mapping keys in the 'data' file to their byte > positions. The index file is intended to fit in memory, so it should > remain small. There is one entry in the index file for each data block > in the Avro container file." > > Doug > > On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 8:37 AM, [email protected] > <[email protected]> wrote: >> > Hello, >> > >> > Is it possible to have random access to a record in an avro file? For >> > instance, if I have an avro file with a schema containing four records: >> > employee id, name, address and phone. While reading the file, is there any >> > way at all to directly jump to a record with employee id 100 instead of >> > having to scan the whole file every single time and filtering out records? >> > >> > Thanks for the help. >> > >> > -- >> > Swarnim -- Swarnim
