Hi everyone, I'm of the opinion that HBase should provide a mechanism for serializing common java types such that the serialized format sorts according the the natural ordering of the type. I think many application efforts end up building a custom, partial implementation of this kind of functionality on their own. I think HBase should provide a canonical implementation of such a serialization format so that third-parties can reliably build on top of HBase. Not just user applications, but other tools like Pig and Hive are also enabled. Implementations for HIVE-3634<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-3634>, HIVE-2599 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-2599>, or HIVE-2903<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-2903>could be compatible with similar features in Pig.
After implementing something similar on multiple occasions, stumbled across the Orderly <https://github.com/ndimiduk/orderly> library. It's also appears to have been adopted by other large projects, including Lily<https://github.com/NGDATA/orderly>. I've engaged the library's author for some improvements only to find out he's now at Google and will no longer be maintaining it. Thus, I propose we take it into HBase. HBASE-7692 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-7692> includes a patch that introduces Orderly into hbase-common under the orderly namespace. I have an associated branch on gihub<https://github.com/ndimiduk/hbase/commits/7692-ordered-serialization>wherein I've broken the patch out into multiple commits to ease review. Please take a few minutes to give it a look. Thanks, Nick
