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Status

Current state: [One of "Under Discussion", "Accepted", "Rejected"]

Discussion thread: here [Change the link from the KIP proposal email archive to your own email thread]

JIRA: here [Change the link from KAFKA-1 to your own ticket]

Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

The DSL currently supports windowed aggregations for only two types of time-based window: hopping and tumbling. A third kind of window is defined, but only used in join operations: sliding windows. Users needing sliding window semantics can approximate them with hopping windows where the advance time is 1, but this workaround only artificially resembles the sliding window model; aggregates would be output for every defined hopping window, of which there will likely be a large number (specifically, the size of the window in milliseconds).

More importantly, the semantics differ slightly. Sliding windows are inclusive at both ends (ie start and end time bounds), whereas hopping/tumbling windows are inclusive/exclusive.

Also of interest is the potential for reuse as the underlying mechanism for a stream-self join. Currently this is not supported, or even allowed, in the Streams DSL. But with the addition of sliding window aggregations to the built-in operators, we could detect a stream-self join and convert it to a sliding window aggregation under the covers. It may be easier to reason about stream-self joins than aggregations for some users, or in some use cases, so there is value in adding both possibilities to the DSL. It's basically a "buy one, get one free" situation with respect to filling in gaps in the API.

Public Interfaces

Describe the problems you are trying to solve.

Public Interfaces

Briefly list any new interfaces that will be introduced as part of this proposal or any existing interfaces that will be removed or changed. The purpose of this section is to concisely call out the public contract that will come along with this feature.

A public interface is any change to the following:

• Binary log format

• The network protocol and api behavior

• Any class in the public packages under clientsConfiguration, especially client configuration

  • org/apache/kafka/common/serialization

  • org/apache/kafka/common

  • org/apache/kafka/common/errors

  • org/apache/kafka/clients/producer

  • org/apache/kafka/clients/consumer (eventually, once stable)

• Monitoring

• Command line tools and arguments

• Anything else that will likely break existing users in some way when they upgrade

Proposed Changes

Describe the new thing you want to do in appropriate detail. This may be fairly extensive and have large subsections of its own. Or it may be a few sentences. Use judgement based on the scope of the change.

...

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

N/A

• What impact (if any) will there be on existing users?
• If we are changing behavior how will we phase out the older behavior?
• If we need special migration tools, describe them here.
• When will we remove the existing behavior?

Rejected Alternatives

If there are alternative ways of accomplishing the same thing, what were they? The purpose of this section is to motivate why the design is the way it is and not some other way.

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