I'm currently using hadoop mapreduce jobs with SequenceFiles of writables. The same Writable type are used for serialization also in the non-hadoop related parts of the system.
This method is hard to maintain - mainly because of the lack of schema and the need for manual handling of version changes.
It appears that apache avro handles these issues.
The problem is, that during the migration I will have data in both formats. is there a simple way to handle the migration?