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• The community focused on the new SQL DDL feature in recent releases. SQL DDL is well-designed and has many rich features. However, Descriptor API lacks many key features, e.g. computed columns, primary key, partition key and so on. 
• Currently, a connector must implement a corresponding Descriptor (e.g. new Kafka()) to use the "connect" API. We hope connectors can be registered without a corresponding Descriptor. This can ease the development of connectors and can be a replacement of registerTableSource/Sink.
• The underlying implementation of Descriptor API and SQL DDL are different. It’s expensive to maintain two different code path. 
• There are many known issues about Descriptor API: FLINK-

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• 17548, FLINK-17186, FLINK-15801, FLINK-15943.

Public Interfaces

We propose to drop the existing method TableEnvironment#connect (deprecated in 1.11) and some related interfaces/classes, including:

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