A factory for constructing encoders that convert external row to/from the Spark SQL internal binary representation.

The following is a mapping between Spark SQL types and its allowed external types:

BooleanType -> java.lang.Boolean
ByteType -> java.lang.Byte
ShortType -> java.lang.Short
IntegerType -> java.lang.Integer
FloatType -> java.lang.Float
DoubleType -> java.lang.Double
StringType -> String
DecimalType -> java.math.BigDecimal or scala.math.BigDecimal or Decimal

DateType -> java.sql.Date if spark.sql.datetime.java8API.enabled is false
DateType -> java.time.LocalDate if spark.sql.datetime.java8API.enabled is true

TimestampType -> java.sql.Timestamp if spark.sql.datetime.java8API.enabled is false
TimestampType -> java.time.Instant if spark.sql.datetime.java8API.enabled is true

TimestampNTZType -> java.time.LocalDateTime

DayTimeIntervalType -> java.time.Duration
YearMonthIntervalType -> java.time.Period

BinaryType -> byte array
ArrayType -> scala.collection.Seq or Array
MapType -> scala.collection.Map
StructType -> org.apache.spark.sql.Row