Shall we change the hashing to encoding to reduce potential replicated cache files?
This is an interesting idea !
Do you have ideas about how to approach the decoding and the normalization ? @lhoestq
I think we first need to save the transformation chain to a list in `self._fingerprint`. Then we can
- decode all the current saved datasets to see if there is already one that is equivalent to the transformation we need now.
- or, calculate all the possible hash value of the current chain for comparison so that we could continue to use hashing.
If we find one, we can adjust the list in `self._fingerprint` to it.

As for the transformation reordering rules, we can just start with some manual rules, like two sort on the same column should merge to one, filter and select can change orders.

And for encoding and decoding, we can just manually specify `sort` is 0, `shuffling` is 2 and create a base-n number or use some general algorithm like `base64.urlsafe_b64encode`.

Because we are not doing lazy evaluation now, we may not be able to normalize the transformation to its minimal form. If we want to support that, we can provde a `Sequential` api and let user input a list or transformation, so that user would not use the intermediate datasets. This would look like tf.data.Dataset.
Hi there. For now, we are using `xxhash` to hash the transformations to fingerprint and we will save a copy of the processed dataset to disk if there is a new hash value. However, there are some transformations that are idempotent or commutative to each other. I think that encoding the transformation chain as the fingerprint may help in those cases, for example, use `base64.urlsafe_b64encode`. In this way, before we want to save a new copy, we can decode the transformation chain and normalize it to prevent omit potential reuse. As the main targets of this project are the really large datasets that cannot be loaded entirely in memory, I believe it would save a lot of time if we can avoid some write.

If you have interest in this, I'd love to help :).