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The TableDescriptor is an unified interface/class to represent a SQL DDL strucutre (or CatalogTable internally). It can be a specific connector descriptor, e.g. Kafka, or a general purpose descriptor, i.e. Connector. All the methods can be chained called on the instance, including .schema(), .partitionedBy(), and .like(). We will discuss TableDescriptor in detail in the Proposed Changes section.

The A full example will look like this:

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Additionally, we would like to propose two new method methods for better usability for Table API users. 

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interface TableEnvironment {
  /** reads a table from the given descriptor */
  Table from(TableDescriptor tableDescriptor); 
  // we already have a "from(String)" method to get registered table from catalog
}

interface Table {
  /** Writes the Table to a sink that is specified by the given descriptor. */
  TableResult executeInsert(TableDescriptor tableDescriptor); 
  // we already have a "executeInsert(String)" method to write into a registered table in catalog
}

With the above two methods, Table API users can skip the table registering step and can use the source/sink out-of-box. For example:

Schema schema = new Schema()
   .column("user_id", DataTypes.BIGINT())
   .column("score", DataTypes.DECIMAL(10, 2))
   .column("ts", DataTypes.TIMESTAMP(3));
Table myKafka = tEnv.from(
   new Kafka()
      .version("0.11")
      .topic("user_logs")
      .property("bootstrap.servers", "localhost:9092")
      .property("group.id", "test-group")
      .startFromEarliest()
      .sinkPartitionerRoundRobin()
      .format(new Json().ignoreParseErrors(false))
      .schema(schema)
);
myKafka.executeInsert(
   new Connector("filesystem")
      .option("path", "/path/to/whatever")
      .option("format", "json")
   .schema(schema)
);

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.

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