This PR introduces a new set of APIs to Spark SQL to allow other developers to add support for reading data from new sources in `org.apache.spark.sql.sources`.
New sources must implement the interface `BaseRelation`, which is responsible for describing the schema of the data. BaseRelations have three `Scan` subclasses, which are responsible for producing an RDD containing row objects. The [various Scan interfaces](https://github.com/marmbrus/spark/blob/foreign/sql/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/sources/package.scala#L50) allow for optimizations such as column pruning and filter push down, when the underlying data source can handle these operations.
By implementing a class that inherits from RelationProvider these data sources can be accessed using using pure SQL. I've used the functionality to update the JSON support so it can now be used in this way as follows:
```sql
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE jsonTableSQL
USING org.apache.spark.sql.json
OPTIONS (
path '/home/michael/data.json'
)
```
Further example usage can be found in the test cases: https://github.com/marmbrus/spark/tree/foreign/sql/core/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/sources
There is also a library that uses this new API to read avro data available here:
https://github.com/marmbrus/sql-avro
Author: Michael Armbrust <michael@databricks.com>
Closes#2475 from marmbrus/foreign and squashes the following commits:
1ed6010 [Michael Armbrust] Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into foreign
ab2c31f [Michael Armbrust] fix test
1d41bb5 [Michael Armbrust] unify argument names
5b47901 [Michael Armbrust] Remove sealed, more filter types
fab154a [Michael Armbrust] Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into foreign
e3e690e [Michael Armbrust] Add hook for extraStrategies
a70d602 [Michael Armbrust] Fix style, more tests, FilteredSuite => PrunedFilteredSuite
70da6d9 [Michael Armbrust] Modify API to ease binary compatibility and interop with Java
7d948ae [Michael Armbrust] Fix equality of AttributeReference.
5545491 [Michael Armbrust] Address comments
5031ac3 [Michael Armbrust] Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into foreign
22963ef [Michael Armbrust] package objects compile wierdly...
b069146 [Michael Armbrust] traits => abstract classes
34f836a [Michael Armbrust] Make @DeveloperApi
0d74bcf [Michael Armbrust] Add documention on object life cycle
3e06776 [Michael Armbrust] remove line wraps
de3b68c [Michael Armbrust] Remove empty file
360cb30 [Michael Armbrust] style and java api
2957875 [Michael Armbrust] add override
0fd3a07 [Michael Armbrust] Draft of data sources API
9c0eb57c73