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Andy Coates commented on AVRO-2164: ----------------------------------- Hey [~rdblue], thanks for your time on this subject. Maybe always reading a decimal at the same scale as it was written would be a good first step. It will mean some systems need to coerce decimals to the scale of the read-schema as a secondary step, but that does at least then mean they have full control over rounding / error handling. This will necessitate a lot of people writing very similar code, which we may want to bring in to the avro libraries at some point. > Make Decimal a first class type. > -------------------------------- > > Key: AVRO-2164 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-2164 > Project: Avro > Issue Type: Improvement > Components: logical types > Affects Versions: 1.8.2 > Reporter: Andy Coates > Priority: Major > > I'd be interested to hear the communities thoughts on making decimal a first > class type. > The current logical type encodes a decimal into a _bytes_ or _fixed_. This > encoding does not include any information about the scale, i.e. this encoding > is lossy. > There are open issues around the compatibility / evolvability of schemas > containing decimal logical types, (e.g. AVRO-2078 & AVRO-1721), that mean > reading data that was previously written with a different scale will result > in data corruption. > If these issues were fixed, with suitable compatibility checks put in place, > this would then make it impossible to evolve an Avro schema where the scale > needs to be changed. This inability to evolve the scale is very restrictive, > and can result in high overhead for organizations that _need_ to change the > scale, i.e. they may potentially need to copy their entire data set, > deserializing with the old scale and re-serializing with the new. > If _decimal_ were promoted to a first class type, this would allow the scale > to be captured in the serialized form, allow for schema evolution support. -- This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v7.6.3#76005)