On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 12:52 AM, Scott Carey <sc...@richrelevance.com>wrote:
I'm not sure it makes sense to map Avro data into CSV.
I agree that mapping arbitrary Avro data into CSV is difficult. But,
for some cases it might be sensible, for example, when the top-level
schema is a record whose fields are primitive types. In general, one
could simply flatten the schema to primitive types, and escape values
which contain commas. This will not work well with recursive schemas or
unions, and one can only restore such a format to Avro if one has the
identical schema, but I think these might be acceptable, necessary
limitations. Errors can be generated if these conditions are not met.
Peng Cui wrote:
But i think, why we do not generate a schema for
each CSV data file?
Yes, I think such an approach could be practical and useful.
We should consider uses cases. One use case is exporting Avro data to
tools that accept CSV, e.g., a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet will never
represent the full structure of Avro data, but, when possible, it might
still be useful to be able to export Avro data to a spreadsheet.
Doug
