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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

TopN is very commonly supported feature in SQL-like queries, and widely used in tech and non-tech industry alike. For example, a blog site owner would like to know the top 5 active authors posting blogs:

SELECT * FROM authors ORDER BY num_posts DESC LIMIT 5

similarly a professor wants to know the top 10 students in their final, a salesman wants to know best selling products, etc. These needs are important to be satisfied in traditional database. In the streaming SQL, this is also a valuable problem to be solved natively on Streams to natively support `ORDER BY` and `LIMIT` semantics on KSQL, instead of relying on customized implementations. 

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

To breakdown, the TopN operator is aiming at globally sort all the emitted key-value pairs from upstream operator, and only retain the top N values within its state as a KTable. We also see cases where the TopN query is partitioned, such as a salesperson wants to know the best sellers in different categories. Considering the nature of ever updating streams, it is also necessary to support windowed TopN as well.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

  • 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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