Make `Accumulators` and `ScalarValue` serializable

[ameyc]

Is your feature request related to a problem or challenge?

When running continuous computations, we'd like to snapshot the state of our operators many of which use accumulators. This would be key to make computations over continuous streams a first class citizen in DataFusion (see #11365 ).

Describe the solution you'd like

Addition of a SerializableAccumulator trait -

pub trait SerializableAccumulator: Accumulator {
    fn serialize(&self) -> Result<Vec<u8>>;
    fn deserialize(bytes: &[u8]) -> Result<Box<dyn Accumulator>>
    where
        Self: Sized;
}

as well as a method on the Accumulator trait -

fn as_serializable(&self) -> Option<&dyn SerializableAccumulator> {
        None
    }

This would mean ScalarValue also needs to implement serialization to [u8]. We have a POC PR on our fork of DataFusion for this.

Would love to hear feedback from the community on this proposal.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[jayzhan211]

Should we support serialization in substrait?

Maybe extend it to serialize AggregateExec? https://github.com/apache/datafusion/blob/16a3148354e81e1ae4e2aebdd83c07799164ac14/datafusion/substrait/src/physical_plan/producer.rs#L122-L124

[ozankabak]

The way we solved this was to add a sister method to the state method (we called it full_state), which returns the full state instead of just the output-producing part (like how state does). Then, we just added some capabilities to serialize ArrayRefs and we achieved serializability for built-in accumulators with very little introduced complexity. AFAICT there is no issue with serializing ScalarValues.

This may be something that could live in upstream if there is sufficient interest in it (it doesn't seem to overfit to any particular usage of DF). I will monitor this issue and we may patch this stuff to upstream DF if appropriate.

[ameyc]

we'd be very interested in this @ozankabak

[ameyc]

Maybe extend it to serialize AggregateExec?

Not super familiar with the subtrait project but would this also serialize the state of the accumulators?

[jayzhan211]

Maybe extend it to serialize AggregateExec?

Not super familiar with the subtrait project but would this also serialize the state of the accumulators?

I guess so. https://substrait.io/

There is also another issue for physical expr serialization https://github.com/apache/datafusion/issues/11350