Avro-Util

A collection of utilities and libraries to allow java projects to better work with avro.

How To Use

Artifacts are published to bintray. To use them (say in a gradle build) you'd need to add that bintray repository to your build.gradle, and then add a dependency on the module(s) you wish to use:

repositories {
   maven {
      url  "https://dl.bintray.com/linkedin/maven"
   }
}
...
dependencies {
   compile "com.linkedin.avroutil1:helper-all:0.1.8"
}

Background

Apache Avro is a widely used serialization format.

Unfortunately it is not always possible to write java code that "just works" across multiple versions of avro, as there have been breaking changes to both the API and wire format. This project provides utility code to enable java developers to write code that is compatible across a wide range of avro versions

Furthermore, this project enables Avro-based projects to achieve better performance.

Modules

The following modules are available in this project.

helper

This module provides utility functions which, when coded against, ensure compatibility with every Avro supported version. This is achieved by offering a single API which, under the hood, delegates to the Avro version which is detected at runtime.

avro-codegen

This module provides code generation capabilities which allows an auto-generated SpecificRecord class to work with all supported versions of Avro.

avro-fastserde

This is a fork of https://github.com/RTBHOUSE/avro-fastserde

In a nut shell, avro-fastserde enables faster Avro de/serialization by doing runtime code-generation to provide a faster decoder/encoder implementation.

As part of this fork, there are compatibility improvements to ensure that the decoding semantics are the same as that of regular Avro (in particular around the handling of String types in modern Avro). Moreover, this fork enables partial compatibility with older versions of Avro. Finally, this fork provides supports for object re-use, a standard Avro deserialization feature, as well as some other garbage-collection optimizations which have proven useful at LinkedIn.

Supported versions of Avro

The helper module supports avro 1.4 - 1.9 inclusive. for fastserde support:

Version	Serialization	Deserialization	Fast Serialization	Fast Deserialization
Avro 1.4	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Avro 1.5	Yes	Yes	No	No
Avro 1.6	Yes	Yes	No	No
Avro 1.7	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Avro 1.8	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Avro 1.9	Yes	Yes	???	???