BigData / Apache Hudi Interview Questions
When should you choose Copy-on-Write over Merge-on-Read?
CoW is the better fit when a workload is read-heavy and update volume is moderate — dashboards, BI queries, or any consumer that wants native Parquet read speed with zero merge overhead at query time.
It also simplifies operations: there's no compaction service to schedule and tune, since every write already produces fully-merged Parquet. The trade-off to accept is write latency — if updates are frequent or touch large files, CoW's rewrite-the-whole-file approach becomes the bottleneck, which is the signal to look at MoR instead.
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