Stefan, It makes sense to me to mark the Avro plugin experimental. Clearly, there are bugs. I also want to note your requirements and expectations haven't always been in alignment with what the Avro plugin developers built/envisioned (especially around schemas). As part of trying to address these gaps, I'd like to ask again for you to provide actual data and tests cases so we make sure that the Avro plugin includes those as future test cases. (This is absolutely the best way to ensure that the project continues to work for your use case.)
The bigger issue I see here is that you expect the community to spend time doing what you want. You have already received a lot of that via free support and numerous bug fixes by myself, Jason and others. You need to remember: this community is run by a bunch of volunteers. Everybody here has a day job. A lot of time I spend in the community is at the cost of my personal life. For others, it is the same. This is a good place to ask for help but you should never demand it. If you want paid support, I know Ted offered this from MapR and I'm sure if you went that route, your issues would get addressed very quickly. If you don't want to go that route, then I suggest that you help by creating more example data and test cases and focusing on what are the most important issues that you need to solve. From there, you can continue to expect that people will help you--as they can. There are no guarantees in open source. Everything comes through the kindness and shared goals of those in the community. thanks, Jacques -- Jacques Nadeau CTO and Co-Founder, Dremio On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 5:43 AM, Stefán Baxter <ste...@activitystream.com> wrote: > Hi, > > Is it at all possible that we are the only company trying to use Avro with > Drill to some serious extent? > > We continue to coma across all sorts of embarrassing shortcomings like the > one we are dealing with now where a schema change exception is thrown even > when working with a single Avro file (that has the same schema). > > Can a non project member call for a discussion on this topic and the level > of support that is offered for Avro in Drill? > > My discussion topics would be: > > - Strange schema validation that ... : > ... currently fails on single file > ... prevents dirX variables to work > ... would require Drill to scan all Avro files to establish schema (even > when pruning would be used) > ... would ALWAY fail for old queries if the an old Avro file, containing > the original fields, was removed and could not be scanned > ... does not rhyme with the "eliminate ETL" and "Evolving Schema" goals > of Drill > > - Simple union types do not work to declare nullable fields > > - Drill can not read Parquet that is created by parquet-mr-avro > > - What is the intention for Avro in Drill > - Should we select to use some other format to buffer/badge data before > creating a Parquet file for it? > > - The culture here regarding talking about boring/hard topics like this > - Where serious complaints/issues are met with silence > - I know full well that my frustration shines through here and that it > not helping but this Drill+Avro mess is really getting too much for us > to > handle > > Look forward do discuss this here or during the next hangout. > > Regards, > -Stefán (or ... mr. old & frustrated) >
