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Motivation

A common UDF type is the ScalarFunction.  This works well for CPU-intensive operations, but less well for IO bound or otherwise long-running computations.  One example of this is remote calls to external systems where networking, serialization, and database lookups might dominate the execution time. StreamTask has a single thread serially executing operators and their contained calls, which happen synchronously in the remote call case. Since each call can take, say, 1 second or more, that limits throughput and the overall performance, potentially accumulating backpressure to the upstream operator. The solution is to either: increase the parallelism of the query (resulting in a higher resource cost, overhead, etc.) or asynchronously fire off many requests concurrently and receive results as they complete. This FLIP aims to address the latter solution by introducing AsyncScalarFunction, a new UDF type which allows for issuing concurrent function calls.

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