Page History

...

• Hive code does a lot of pointer-based equality using PrimitiveTypeEntry/TypeInfo/ObjectInspector objects. So a varchar(15) object inspector is not equal to a varchar(10). This may have some advantages such as requiring conversion/length enforcement in this case, but it seems like this may not always be desirable behavior.

• The SerDe initialize() method receives a string representation of the column types in the "column.types" property. Unfortunately we can't just use the same syntax as was used during the column definition here (i.e., "decimal(10,2)"), because it looks like the current convention for this type string uses commas as a delimiter between the different column types, so "decimal(10,2)" would be considered 2 different column types "decimal(10" and "2)". There seem to be a few SerDes which use String.split(",") on this type string, and there may be a chance that we could affect 3rd party SerDe implementations if we change the format of this string value.

MetaStore Changes

There are a few different options here:

...