Hi, I am a complete noob with Hadoop and MapReduce and I have a question that is probably silly, but I still don't know the answer.
For the purposes of discussion I'll assume that I'm using a standard TextInputFormat. (I don't think that this changes things too much.) To simplify (a fair bit) I want to count all the records that meet specific criteria. I would like to use MapReduce because I anticipate large sources and I want to get the performance and reliability that MapReduce offers. So the obvious and simple approach is to have my Mapper check whether each record meets the criteria and emit a 0 or a 1. Then I could use a combiner which accumulates (like a LongSumReducer) and use this as a reducer as well, and I am sure that that would work fine. However it seems massive overkill to have all those "1"s and "0"s emitted and stored on disc. It seems tempting to have the Mapper accumulate the count for all of the records that it sees and then just emit once at the end the total value. This seems simple enough, except that the Mapper doesn't seem to have any easy way to know when it is presented with the last record. Now I could just make the Mapper take a copy of the OutputCollector for each record called and then in the close method it could do a single emit. However, although, this looks like it would work with the current implementation, there seem to be no guarantees that the collector is valid at the time that the close is called. This just seems ugly. Or I could get the Mapper to record the first offset that it sees and read the split length using report.getInputSplit().getLength() and then it could monitor how far it is through the split and it should be able to detect the last record. It looks like the MapRunner class creates a Mapper object and uses it to process a split, and so it looks like it's safe to store state in the mapper class between invocations of the map method. (But is this just an implementation artefact? Is the mapper class supposed to be completely stateless?) Maybe I should have a custom InputFormat class and have it flag the last record by placing some extra information in the key? (Assuming that the InputFormant has enough information from the split to be able to detect the last record, which seems reasonable enough.) Is there some "blessed" way to do this? Or am I barking up the wrong tree because I should really just generate all those "1"s and "0"s and accept the overhead? Regards, Peter Marron Trillium Software UK Limited
