Protocol Buffers and Hadoop

Question

I am new to the Hadoop world. I know that Hadoop has its own serialization mechanism called Writables. And that AVRO is another such library. I wanted to know whether we can write map-reduce jobs using the Google's protocol buffer serialization? If yes then can someome point to a good example to get me started.

Answer 1

Twitter has published their elephant-bird library which allows hadoop to work with protocol buffers files.