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Column/field description

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Domain
data

Research direction

Start by reviewing the ORC file format specification and how its schema metadata is defined. Determine where a field or column description would belong, then document an agreed representation and confirm that the specification preserves this metadata when storing ORC files.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hello,

I may have misunderstood or misread the documentation but I didn't find it. I would love to have a field/column description just like we have in databases :

Image

It also exists in a lot of format such as Tableau Hyper, Alteryx yxdb, etc

As for now, it means loosing informations when storing in ORC.

Since it's a very common metadata and a lot of file format already have it, I think this is way better to have it in the file format specification. As of today, this is probably my main pain point with ORC. If you want the software industry to adopt it (and that's all the idea here), the specification really have to mention something like "field description" or "column description" that everyone will agree with.

Best regards,

Simon

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Forks
7
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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