# twitter/elephant-bird

Twitter's collection of LZO and Protocol Buffer-related Hadoop, Pig, Hive, and HBase code.

Repository: https://github.com/twitter/elephant-bird
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/elephant-bird
Language: Java
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2023-04-10T11:31:57+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 23/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 6006, "days_push": 1241, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1133, forks 382 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:43.045088+00:00)

## What it is
Twitter's Java library of LZO, Thrift, and Protocol Buffer-related Hadoop InputFormats, Pig LoadFuncs, Hive SerDes, and HBase utilities. It enables big-data pipelines to read and write compressed and serialized data formats across the Hadoop ecosystem.

## Use cases
- read LZO-compressed files in Hadoop MapReduce jobs
- load Protocol Buffer data into Pig
- use Thrift serialized data with Hive SerDe
- process protobuf records in Hadoop
- integrate HBase with Pig and Hive pipelines

## When to choose
- you run legacy Hadoop/Pig/Hive pipelines handling LZO, Thrift, or Protocol Buffer data
- you need battle-tested input/output formats proven in Twitter production

## When to avoid
- you use modern data engines like Spark or Flink with native format support
- you need actively developed features - the project is largely in maintenance mode
- your stack doesn't involve the Hadoop ecosystem

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: maintenance
- function: serialization, compression, etl, database
- domain: big-data, developer-tools
- platform: jvm, cloud
- tags: hadoop, pig, hive, hbase, lzo, protocol-buffers, thrift, inputformat, data-engineering

## Member repositories
- twitter/elephant-bird (main) score 23

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:43.045088+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T06:37:28.700025+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/twitter/elephant-bird (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:43.045088+00:00, sha a9eff1154103)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.