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feat(core): bound log-file memory with a windowed read and a lazy block scan - #670

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feat(core): bound log-file memory with a windowed read and a lazy block scan#670
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@linliu-code linliu-code commented Aug 7, 2026

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Stacked on #639#669 — review only the last three commits.

The problem

Reading a merge-on-read file group pulls every log file into memory whole and decodes every block in it, then applies five gates and discards most of the results. Peak memory tracks the largest log file, and the decode cost is paid for blocks nothing will use.

Measured

eager  file=91MB rows=1200000 baseline=13MB peak=213MB (+200 MB)
lazy   file=91MB rows=1200000 baseline=13MB peak= 51MB (+38 MB)

5.3× less resident memory for the same 1.2M rows. The whole-file read holds the file and every decoded block at once; the windowed sweep holds one window and one block's content.

Reproduce with the benchmark in commit 3 — note each mode must run in its own process, see below.

The change

Commit 1 — a windowed reader. StorageReader gains a second mode: new_streaming fetches nothing up front and serves reads out of a 16 MB window, refilling as the cursor moves. new still reads the whole file and is untouched; both look identical through Read/Seek. LogBlockFetcher comes with it — an object-store handle and a path, no bytes — so a block can read its own range later.

Commit 2 — a lazy block scan. The scan walks headers out of the window, recording where each block's content sits without reading it. The gates run on headers, as they already did (Pass 1 never looked at content). Each surviving block then reads its own range.

Commit 3 — the measurement above.

Why ranged reads go through a shared runtime

Read is synchronous, object_store is not, and both obvious bridges fail:

  • the sync read can be reached from inside another runtime, where block_on panics with "Cannot start a runtime from within a runtime"
  • a runtime built per read takes hyper's connection dispatcher down with it when dropped, failing every later request against the same cached store

So reads are spawned onto a process-lifetime runtime and waited on over a channel.

Correctness

The property this rests on: sweep-then-inflate equals the eager read. Three tests assert it directly, one per block type — same block count, same headers, same decoded row counts — for Avro, Parquet and Delete blocks.

Beyond that, the whole v2 path now runs this way, so the existing suite is the real evidence: 58 harness cases and 19 gold fixtures still match their Spark snapshots, reading real merge-on-read tables end to end.

Three more on the reader itself: streaming matches eager across window refills on a file larger than two windows; seeking backwards refills and seeking past the end reads nothing; a fetcher reads only its own range.

Three details worth review

Corruption is still detected during the sweep, not deferred with the content. A corrupt block cannot be trusted to say where the next one starts.

The recorded content range starts at the block's content-length field, not after it — decoding reads that field itself. Getting this wrong produced Invalid log block version: 228, which is how the equivalence tests earned their keep.

The benchmark runs one mode per process on purpose. Measuring both in one process charges the second for whatever the first peaked at, since a freed allocation does not return resident pages. Run that way the windowed path appears to use more, not less — my first measurement said 148 MB vs 101 MB, which is an artifact, not a result.

Full workspace green: 1200 lib + 79 table-read + 39 datafusion + 21 + 12. No new clippy findings in the changed files.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

linliu-code and others added 13 commits August 3, 2026 22:01
Squashed view of apache#639-apache#662 for review. Not for merge — the reviewable
increments are those PRs; this is the same code in one diff.

Ports the merge-on-read file group reader from onehouseinc/hudi-rs-internal
into hudi-core, wires it behind a switch that defaults to the reader that has
always served reads, and brings its end-to-end test harness across.

The ported reader is `pub(crate)` and reached only through
`hoodie.read.merge.engine = v2`. Nothing changes for anyone who does not set
it. It is not at parity yet: the gaps are pinned as ignored cases carrying
their findings, and the outstanding decisions are in the PR descriptions.

Four fixes land on paths the existing reader shares: decimals had no Arrow
conversion, Avro timestamp logical types lost their UTC zone, the
properties-escaped create schema was not being unescaped by one of its two
consumers, and the base file reader had no way to accept a pushdown predicate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A delete block whose ordering value is anything but a small integer fails to
read, with errors like `Union index 1490 out of bounds: 2`. The index is
nonsense because the byte stream is misaligned, not because a branch was chosen
wrongly.

`orderingVal` is declared here as a union of primitives. Hudi writes a union of
per-type wrapper records, and inserted `BooleanWrapper` at position 1, so every
position from `int` onward names a different type than this crate assumes.
Position 3 is `float` here and `LongWrapper` there. Reading a long as a float
consumes four bytes instead of two, and the next record's key length is read
from the middle of the previous value.

The delete block in `table_delete_ord_long` is exactly self-consistent under
Hudi's schema and not under this one:

    04 | 02 02 34 | 02 00 | 06 c0 3e | 02 02 33 | 02 00 | 06 f0 2e | 00
    two records, keys "4" and "3", ordering position 3, values 4000 and 3000

Decoded here, position 3 is a float, so `c0 3e 02 02` is eaten and `33` becomes
the next key's union index: zigzag 0x33 is -26, which is the reported error.

So this takes Hudi's schema. Two things follow from it:

The Arrow side wants a scalar, not a record with one field, so the wrapper is
unwrapped after the schema is narrowed — narrowing reads the position Hudi
wrote, and unwrapping rewrites it, so the order matters.

The wrapper is chosen for the value rather than for the column, so a table
whose ordering column is a long can still carry an `IntWrapper` for a small
value. The delete batch's ordering column is now cast to the type the data
schema declares. The old schema hid this by calling position 2 a long
regardless, which happened to match the two fixtures that exercise it.

`ArrayWrapper` orders by a list and is rejected in both places that read the
position, rather than mapped to something that would disagree with its value.

Older tables written with the primitive union are not supported. No fixture
here uses one, and the two shapes cannot be told apart from the bytes: where
they differ, decoding usually fails, and at position 2 both succeed and yield
the same number.

Un-ignores the eleven cases that pinned this.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
An Avro map was modelled as `Dictionary(Utf8, V)`. An Arrow dictionary key must
be an integer, so that is not a valid type — and it does not reconcile against
the `Map` a parquet base file carries, so any table with a map column fails to
read once a log block has to be merged with its base file.

Avro maps become `Map(key_value: struct<key: string, value: V>)`, matching what
the parquet reader produces, so the two agree by name and by shape.

The array side builds a `MapArray`. Entries are materialized as two-field
records so the existing struct machinery builds both children, which is also why
`child_schema_lookup` now registers those two positions — a struct-valued map
needs its own fields resolvable underneath them.

Entries are emitted in key order. Avro maps are unordered and the Arrow type
says so, but a stable order keeps a read reproducible rather than dependent on
hash iteration.

This is on the shared conversion, so it fixes the existing read path too: a map
column has never been readable through either reader.

Un-ignores the case covering NULL elements inside containers. Two other cases
that were pinned on this stay pinned, now on a decimal column reading as NULL —
a separate gap this one was masking.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The merge-on-read reader was given its schema from
`hoodie.table.create.schema`. That is the schema the table was created with, and
Hudi treats it as a last resort: `TableSchemaResolver` reads the latest commit's
metadata first, then a base file's footer, and only then falls back to the
create schema. This crate's own `schema::resolver::resolve_data_schema` does the
same. The reader was reaching past both for the weakest source.

Reading the base file's own schema is what the existing path effectively does,
so the two engines now start from the same types. It is also what the data
actually has: under schema evolution the create schema is stale, and the engine
evolves each batch to the required schema regardless.

Three workarounds go with it. The create schema arrives as Java writes a
properties file, with `:` escaped, so it had to be unescaped before it would
parse as JSON. It carries no `_hoodie_*` columns, so those had to be prepended
when the table populates them. And a table that never recorded one could not be
read at all — which included every reader built from a bare base URI, the shape
the cxx bridge uses.

Slices with no log files now go through the engine too. They were held back
because the create schema modelled a map as an invalid Arrow dictionary and
every fixture here has a map column; the schema no longer comes from there, and
the conversion itself is fixed separately. The engine reduces to a base file
read, and the test asserting that the setting does not change such a read now
compares the two engines rather than one path with itself.

Reading the footer costs one request. The engine reads it again when it opens
the file; collapsing the two is worth doing but is not this change.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Corruption detection was a stub returning `None`, so a corrupt or truncated
block failed the whole log file. Adopted from the internal reader, which has
carried this for a while.

A well-formed block records its total size twice — once in the header length
field and once in a trailing reverse pointer — and is followed by either another
block or the end of the file. Three checks decide the question:

  1. the trailing pointer has to lie inside the file
  2. the size it records has to agree with the header
  3. what follows the block has to be a magic marker or the end

Every offset is computed with checked arithmetic, so a garbage length reports
corruption rather than panicking or allocating against it. That is the point of
doing this before parsing the body rather than after.

A block that fails yields a corrupt marker, and the reader resumes at the next
magic marker — found by scanning in windows that overlap by five bytes, so a
marker straddling a window boundary is not missed. One bad block now costs its
own span instead of the rest of the file.

Un-ignores the two cases that pinned this.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A decimal column in an Avro log block read as entirely NULL. The vendored
converter resolves a decimal from `Value::Bytes` or `Value::Fixed`, but a
declared `logicalType: decimal` decodes to `Value::Decimal`, which falls through
to `None` — and a `None` there is indistinguishable from a field that was
genuinely null, so the column came back empty rather than failing.

Rather than add the missing arm, this hands the work to `arrow-avro`, which
already handles the logical types and the container types correctly. The map
conversion fixed in the previous change came from the same converter, and the
pattern of a silent wrong answer is what makes it worth replacing rather than
patching.

Two shapes had to be reconciled. A Hudi data block frames each datum with a
four-byte length and no Avro framing, while `arrow-avro`'s decoder expects a
Single Object Encoding prefix. The writer schema is registered once and the ten
bytes that yields — marker plus fingerprint — are written ahead of each body,
into a buffer reused across records.

And `arrow-avro` spells a UTC timestamp's zone as the offset `+00:00` where
parquet spells it `UTC`. The same zone, but Arrow compares timezones as strings,
so a log batch would refuse to concatenate with the base batch it merges with.
Decoded batches are relabelled to `UTC`; the values are already UTC instants, so
nothing is converted.

The decoder is also columnar. The path it replaces built an `apache_avro::Value`
per record — allocating a `String` per string field and a `Vec` per collection —
and then walked that to fill the columns.

The vendored converter stays for now: delete blocks decode from values that are
already parsed, which is a different shape.

Un-ignores the two cases that pinned the decimal.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A base file with an `array<map>` column written by parquet-avro fails to read
with `Map cannot be repeated`, and the file is unreadable by either reader.

That writer defaults to `write-old-list-structure=true`, which encodes the
column as a 2-level list whose element is a REPEATED map group. parquet-rs walks
the LIST node, takes the repeated child for the list wrapper and the map for the
element, and its `visit_map` rejects a REPEATED map unconditionally. Both
arrow-rs and arrow-cpp reject the same physical schema, so the encoding really is
legacy — but Hudi's own reader accepts it, and tables already written this way
have to stay readable.

The reject cannot be avoided at the Arrow level, so the parquet schema is
rewritten before the Arrow build: the legacy repeated map becomes a synthetic
repeated `list` wrapper around a required map. The footer parse never trips the
reject — only the Arrow build does — so normalizing in between fixes every
reader built from that metadata.

Nothing about the data changes. Every leaf keeps its definition and repetition
levels and its position in the DFS order, so the same bytes decode to the same
values and the original row groups are reused as they are.

The rewrite itself was already here with its own tests; it had no caller.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The same encoding the previous change handled for base files also appears in
parquet log blocks, and fails the same way — `Map cannot be repeated` — because
the block was built straight from its footer with no chance to rewrite the
schema in between.

Parse the footer, normalize the legacy list, then build the reader from that
metadata, exactly as the base file path now does.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The base file read pushes a row filter down; a parquet log block read does not,
so every row of every block is decoded and handed to the merge even when the
predicate has already ruled the block out.

The decision of whether pushing is sound stays with the merge-on-read reader,
which is the only place that knows. A log record can update a row, so a
predicate may only be evaluated before the merge when the merge cannot change
its answer. Log blocks exist only on merge-on-read, so the copy-on-write arm of
that gate is unreachable here and it reduces to a predicate over primary keys,
which are immutable across upserts. Anything else is left for the post-merge
filter, as before.

The filter is carried as an optional builder rather than a filter, because the
predicate has to be matched against each block's own schema, which does not
exist until its footer is read. A builder that declines reads every row.

Both the log file reader and the block decoder take it through a setter that
defaults to unset, so the log scanner and every other caller are unaffected.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A partial-update block carries only the columns that were written, and the merge
distinguishes "this column was not in the update" from "this column was set to
null". The block's own schema is the only place that signal exists.

Decoding is already against that schema and never against a wider table schema,
so the narrowness survives — but nothing said so. Upstream needs an explicit
check here because it decodes against a required schema; this crate does not,
which makes the behavior correct by construction and therefore easy to lose.

The test fails the moment a reader schema is supplied to the decoder without
excluding blocks that carry `IsPartial`, which is what will happen when Avro
resolution or extended promotion lands.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A table whose column was promoted from int to long could not be read: the merge
failed with `column 'num' type Int32 incompatible with target Int64`. Both the
base file and the older log blocks predate the promotion, and neither was being
brought up to the current type.

Avro defines int to long as a promotion, so the log side is resolved while the
block is read rather than reconciled afterwards. The required schema is handed
to the decoder, which fills columns added since the block was written and
delivers promoted columns in the promoted type. A block carrying `IsPartial`
keeps decoding against its own schema, since the merge needs to know which
columns the update actually set.

The base file is parquet, so Avro resolution does not reach it. It goes through
the batch evolution instead, which knew how to widen a float and not an integer.
Widening an integer is exact, so it casts directly rather than through a string
the way float to double has to for parity with Java.

Un-ignores the promotion case, which reads the base parquet, a log block written
before the promotion, and one written after, and compares the merged result
against the Spark snapshot — including a value beyond what an int can hold.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reading a log file pulls the whole thing into memory, so peak buffering tracks
the largest file rather than the work being done. The block scan does not need
that: it reads small headers scattered through the file and seeks forward past
content it is not going to decode.

So `StorageReader` gains a second mode. `new_streaming` fetches nothing up
front and serves reads out of a 16 MB window, refilling when the cursor moves
outside it, so what is resident is bounded by the window rather than the file.
`new` still reads the whole file and is untouched, and both modes look the same
through `Read` and `Seek`.

`LogBlockFetcher` comes with it: an object-store handle and a path, no bytes, so
a block that survives the scan can pull its own range when it is read. That is
what makes the window worth having — the scan can walk a file without holding
it, and each admitted block costs its own content and nothing more.

Ranged reads are spawned onto a shared runtime and waited on over a channel.
`Read` is synchronous and the object store is not, and the obvious bridges both
fail: the sync read can be reached from inside another runtime, where `block_on`
panics, and a runtime per read would take hyper's connection dispatcher with it
when dropped, failing every later request against the same cached store.

Nothing uses the streaming mode yet — the log file reader and the block scan
follow.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The merge-on-read scan read every log file whole and decoded every block in it,
then applied five gates and threw most of the results away. Peak memory tracked
the largest log file and the decode cost was paid for blocks nothing would use.

The scan now walks headers out of a bounded window, recording where each block's
content sits without reading it. The gates run on the headers, as they already
did — Pass 1 never looked at content. Each block that survives then reads its own
range, so what is held is one window during the sweep and one block's content
after it.

A block carries a location and a fetcher instead of its bytes; the fetcher holds
an object-store handle and a path, so cloning it costs nothing. `inflate` reads
the range and decodes it with the same settings the eager path would have used,
which is what makes the two indistinguishable.

Corruption is still detected during the sweep rather than deferred with the
content. A corrupt block cannot be trusted to say where the next one starts, so
that check cannot wait.

The content range starts at the block's content-length field rather than after
it, because decoding reads that field itself — the same bytes reach the same
decoder either way.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@linliu-code
linliu-code requested a review from xushiyan as a code owner August 7, 2026 07:21
Quantifies the previous two changes rather than asserting them. Writes a log
file of Avro blocks and reads it both ways, reporting resident size against a
baseline taken before the read.

    eager  file=91MB rows=1200000 baseline=13MB peak=213MB (+200 MB)
    lazy   file=91MB rows=1200000 baseline=13MB peak= 51MB (+38 MB)

Both return the same rows. The whole-file read holds the file and every decoded
block at once; the windowed sweep holds one window and one block's content.

Each mode runs in its own process. Measuring both in one process charges the
second for whatever the first peaked at, because a freed allocation does not
return resident pages — run that way the windowed path appears to use more, not
less.

Ignored by default: it writes about 90MB.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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