apache / apache/paimon-cpp

[Bug] Nullability validation incorrectly checks children masked by null parents

Open
#339 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
bug
Dominant language
C++
Stars
65
Forks
25
Avg merge
2d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
80

Description

### Search before asking

- [x] I searched in the [issues](https://github.com/apache/paimon-cpp/issues) and found nothing similar.

### Paimon-cpp version

master

### Minimal reproduce step

`ArrowUtils::CheckNullabilityMatch` recursively checks complete Arrow child arrays.

For nested Arrow types, a null parent may still have physical child values. These
children are logically hidden and should not participate in nullability validation.
However, if a hidden child is null and its field is non-nullable, the current
implementation rejects the batch.

This affects nested STRUCT, LIST, MAP, and VECTOR fields and is inconsistent with
Java's logical row semantics.

### What doesn't meet your expectations?

Expected behavior:

- Ignore child values masked by a null parent.
- Reject null children when the parent is valid and the child is logically visible.

### Anything else?

_No response_

### Are you willing to submit a PR?

- [x] I'm willing to submit a PR!

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by locating ArrowUtils::CheckNullabilityMatch and the tests covering nested STRUCT, LIST, MAP, and VECTOR arrays. Verify cases where null parents contain physically null children, and cases where valid parents expose null children; done means masked children are ignored while visible non-nullable children are rejected.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
data-engineering
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
58/100

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