Github user StephanEwen commented on the pull request:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-flink/pull/147#issuecomment-59583563
I think the `getMinimumLength()` method would fit better into the type
information. That would be a better separation of roles, because the
serializer's task is actually not to provide statistics for the types. The
`getLength()` method is for the runtime to handle fix-length data types more
efficiently at runtime.
The way the method currently delegates mostly to `getLength()`, it will
return `-1` for the var length data types, leading to weird estimates.
For better size estimates, we might allow type information to sample a
collection of elements to figure out the size.
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