Why pack unpack and not toList[]

The field based API toList should not be used if the size of the list in a groupBy is very large/not known in advance. toList doesn't decrease the data size significantly, and it stands a good chance of creating OOM errors if the lists get too long.A good alternative to toList is to use pack/unpack and reduce. Use pack to convert the tuples into an object, then do a groupBy with a reduce function inside it and have your logic to process the grouped items, combine them etc.

Example 1:

val res_pipe= inputpipe.groupBy('firstname){
 .toList['lastname]
}

Example 2:

case class Person(firstname: String="", lastname: String = "")

val res_pipe= inputpipe.flatMap(('firstname,'lastname)->('firstname,'person)){
in: (String, String) =>
val (firstname,lastname) = in
val person= Person(firstname= firstname,lastname= lastname)
(firstname,person)
}
.groupBy('firstname){
.reduce('person->'combinedperson){
      (personAccumulated: Person, person: Person) =>
       val combined_lastname_person= Person(
       firstname= personAccumulated.firstname,
       lastname= personAccumulated.lastname + ","+ person.lastname,
       )
       combined_lastname_person
}.unpack"["Person"]"('combinedperson->('firstname,'lastname))
//comma separated last names
}