Could you elaborate on #1 please? Wouldn't a distributed cache defeat the purpose of data locality of Hadoop? Regardless, I guess one could write a tap to Avout to enable this?
http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/r0.20.2/api/org/apache/...
and for discussions related to Cascalog: http://groups.google.com/group/cascalog-user/browse_thread/t... and https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cascalog-user/l5SEW3...
I have not seen any info on using Cascalog alongside Avout, but the idea makes sense.