apache/spark — pull request #487 by mateiz (2014-04-22 21:07:21+00:00)
Title: [WIP] [SPARK-1540] Add an optional Ordering parameter to PairRDDFunctions.

In https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-1540 we'd like to look at Spark's API to see if we can take advantage of Comparable keys in more places, which will make external spilling more efficient. This PR is a first step towards that that shows how to pass an Ordering when available and still continue functioning otherwise. It does this using a new implicit parameter with a default value of null.

The API is currently only in Scala -- in Java we'd have to add new versions of mapToPair and such that take a Comparator, or a new method to add a "type hint" to an RDD. We can address those later though.

Unfortunately requiring all keys to be Comparable would not work without requiring RDDs in general to contain only Comparable types. The reason is that methods such as distinct() and intersection() do a shuffle, but should be usable on RDDs of any type. So ordering will have to remain an optimization for the types that can be ordered. I think this isn't a horrible outcome though because one of the nice things about Spark's API is that it works on objects of *any* type, without requiring you to specify a schema or implement Writable or stuff like that.