Streaming Concepts
Flink’s Table API and SQL support are unified APIs for batch and stream processing. This means that Table API and SQL queries have the same semantics regardless whether their input is bounded batch input or unbounded stream input.
The following pages explain concepts, practical limitations, and stream-specific configuration parameters of Flink’s relational APIs on streaming data.
State Management
Table programs that run in streaming mode leverage all capabilities of Flink as a stateful stream processor.
In particular, a table program can be configured with a state backend and various checkpointing options for handling different requirements regarding state size and fault tolerance. It is possible to take a savepoint of a running Table API & SQL pipeline and to restore the application’s state at a later point in time.
State Usage
Due to the declarative nature of Table API & SQL programs, it is not always obvious where and how much state is used within a pipeline. The planner decides whether state is necessary to compute a correct result. A pipeline is optimized to claim as little state as possible given the current set of optimizer rules.
Info Conceptually, source tables are never kept entirely in state. An implementer deals with logical tables (i.e. dynamic tables). Their state requirements depend on the used operations.
Queries such as SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE which only consist of field projections or filters are usually
stateless pipelines. However, operations such as joins, aggregations, or deduplications require keeping
intermediate results in a fault-tolerant storage for which Flink’s state abstractions are used.
Info Please refer to the individual operator documentation for more details about how much state is required and how to limit a potentially ever-growing state size.
For example, a regular SQL join of two tables requires the operator to keep both input tables in state entirely. For correct SQL semantics, the runtime needs to assume that a matching could occur at any point in time from both sides. Flink provides optimized window and interval joins that aim to keep the state size small by exploiting the concept of watermarks.
Stateful Upgrades and Evolution
Table programs that are executed in streaming mode are intended as standing queries which means they are defined once and are continuously evaluated as static end-to-end pipelines.
In case of stateful pipelines, any change to both the query or Flink’s planner might lead to a completely different execution plan. This makes stateful upgrades and the evolution of table programs challenging at the moment. The community is working on improving those shortcomings.
For example, by adding a filter predicate, the optimizer might decide to reorder joins or change the schema of an intermediate operator. This prevents restoring from a savepoint due to either changed topology or different column layout within the state of an operator.
The query implementer must ensure that the optimized plans before and after the change are compatible.
Use the EXPLAIN command in SQL or table.explain() in Table API to get insights.
Since new optimizer rules are continuously added, and operators become more efficient and specialized, also the upgrade to a newer Flink version could lead to incompatible plans.
Warning Currently, the framework cannot guarantee that state can be mapped from a savepoint to a new table operator topology. In other words: Savepoints are only supported if both the query and the Flink version remain constant.
Since the community rejects contributions that modify the optimized plan and the operator topology
in a patch version (e.g. from 1.13.1 to 1.13.2), it should be safe to upgrade a Table API & SQL
pipeline to a newer bug fix release. However, major-minor upgrades from (e.g. from 1.12 to 1.13)
are not supported.
For both shortcomings (i.e. modified query and modified Flink version), we recommend to investigate whether the state of an updated table program can be “warmed up” (i.e. initialized) with historical data again before switching to real-time data. The Flink community is working on a hybrid source to make this switching as convenient as possible.
Where to go next?
- Dynamic Tables: Describes the concept of dynamic tables.
- Time attributes: Explains time attributes and how time attributes are handled in Table API & SQL.
- Versioned Tables: Describes the Temporal Table concept.
- Joins in Continuous Queries: Different supported types of Joins in Continuous Queries.
- Query configuration: Lists Table API & SQL specific configuration options.