Database Reference
In-Depth Information
NOTE
Avro
string
can be represented by either Java
String
or the Avro
Utf8
Java type. The reason to use
Utf8
is efficiency: because it is mutable, a single
Utf8
instance may be reused for reading or writing a
series of values. Also, Java
String
decodes UTF-8 at object construction time, whereas Avro
Utf8
does it lazily, which can increase performance in some cases.
Utf8
implements Java's
java.lang.CharSequence
interface, which allows some interoperability
with Java libraries. In other cases, it may be necessary to convert
Utf8
instances to
String
objects by
calling its
toString()
method.
Utf8
is the default for Generic and Specific, but it's possible to use
String
for a particular mapping.
There are a couple of ways to achieve this. The first is to set the
avro.java.string
property in the
schema to
String
:
{
"type"
:
"string"
,
"avro.java.string"
:
"String"
}
Alternatively, for the Specific mapping, you can generate classes that have
String
-based getters and
setters. When using the Avro Maven plug-in, this is done by setting the configuration property
Finally, note that the Java Reflect mapping always uses
String
objects, since it is designed for Java
compatibility, not performance.
