Getting Started with Avro

Question

I want to get started with using Avro with Map Reduce. Can Someone suggest a good tutorial / example to get started with. I couldnt find much through the internet search.

Answer 1

I recently did a project that was heavily based on Avro data and not having used this data format before, I had to start from scratch. You are right in that it is rather hard to get much help from online sources when getting started with Avro. The material that I would recommend to you is:

• By far, the most helpful source that I found was the Avro section (p103-p116) in Tom White's Hadoop: The Definitive Guide book as well as his Github page for the code he uses in the book.
• For additional code examples I looked at Ron Bodkin's Github page avro-mr-sample.
• In my case I used Python for reading and writing Avro files and for that I used this tutorial.
• Even though it is obvious, I will add the link to the Avro Users mailing list. There is a ton of information to be found there and after I had read the above material and implemented a bunch of code, I found myself spending hours looking through the archives.

Finally, my last suggestion to you is to use Avro 1.4.1 with Hadoop 0.20.2 and ONLY that combination. I had some major issues getting my code to run using Hadoop 0.21 and more recent Avro versions.