I'm still trying to get an intuition as to when to use the Hadoop combiner class (I saw a few articles but they did not specifically help in my situation).
My question is, is it appropriate to use a combiner class when the value of the pair is of the Text class? For instance, let's say we have the following output from the mapper:
fruit apple
fruit orange
fruit banana
...
veggie carrot
veggie celery
...
Can we apply a combiner class here to be:
fruit apple orange banana
...
veggie carrot celery
...
before it even reaches the reducer?