Github user fhueske commented on the pull request:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-flink/pull/147#issuecomment-59699366
I also thought about adding ``getMinimumLength()`` to the type info but
decided for the seriailzers because they define how much data is actually
written out (e.g., length info for strings or size info for arrays). On the
other hand, these few bytes are probably negligible compared to the actual size
of var-length data types.
In fact, ``getMinLength()`` does not delegate to ``getLength()`` for var
length data types (if there's no bug). Forwarding -1 wouldn't make any sense.
You're right, for CollectionDataSource sampling some elements would give
better estimates, but I though the ``getMinLength()`` could also be used for
size estimation during optimization.
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