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Support SymlinkTextInputFormat FileFormat #2208

Description

@tustvold

Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge? Please describe what you are trying to do.

Hive compatible metastores, such as AWS Glue (#2206) do not store the individual files within a partition, and instead rely on listing the files in object storage at query time.

This becomes problematic when interacting with data that is either:

  • Not partitioned in the way that Hive expects
  • Rewrites data leaving parquet files behind that no longer form part of the most recent snapshot (e.g. Delta Lake / IOx)

Describe the solution you'd like

Much like we currently support a FileFormat of CSV or Parquet, I would like to support a FileFormat of SymlinkTextInputFormat. This is just a newline-delimited list of files, stored in object storage alongside a table or partition.

The best documentation for this functionality I can find is here, and there is documentation here on how it is used to enable inter-operation between Presto and Data Lake.

I'm not entirely sure how the query engine determines the format of the symlink targets, but I guess it must use the file suffix??

Describe alternatives you've considered

We could not support this

Additional context

I am not hugely familiar with the precise inner-workings of the Hive ecosystem, as I've only interacted with tooling that uses it under-the-hood. I therefore could be mistaken on some aspect, if so please feel free to correct me 😄

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