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Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2013 10:33:15 -0400
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Subject: Re: Generic Supertypes/Pluggable Client
From: Ed Kohlwey <ekohlwey@gmail.com>
To: dev@accumulo.apache.org
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> Just a knee-jerk reaction here, but allowing a user to provide Text, String
> or byte[] is painful?
>
> I've always viewed it as String if I want to be lazy, and byte[] or Text
> when I'm more concerned about performance and don't want to be making new
> objects for every record I need insert into Accumulo.


The problem isn't that people are allowed to provide different types, the
problem is that the types are inconsistent. Value still has only one method
to get data out, which is get() and returns a byte array. Key has the
option of Text or ByteSequence, neither of which are easily compatible with
CharSequence. CharSequence, Text, or byte[] are allowed as parameters to
Range. Scanner.fetchColumn() is only for Text, unless you use the version
that takes a Column but that is also very inelegant. Every single
application I've worked on with Accumulo has a utility class with methods
to help convert between these types, and then also the application's own
data model. The application code is always unnecessarily inelegant and
confusing to new people on the project. Explaining the necessity of the
(frankly bizarre) type conversion scaffold always makes programmers who are
new to the platform make a stinkface and ask why it is still written the
way it is.

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