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[This FLIP proposal is a joint work between Xuannan Su   and Dong Lin  ]

Motivation

Assuming the user needs to perform a temporal join, where the Probe Side comes from Kafka and the Build Side comes from a MySQL CDC Source (with a snapshot reading phase and a binlog reading phase), and all input data lacks event-time information. The user requires each data record on the Probe Side to be joined with at least the data from the Build Side's snapshot phase. In other words, the Join operator needs to wait for the Build Side's snapshot phase to finish reading its data before processing the Probe Side's data.

Currently, Flink cannot support the use case above. Flink SQL does not support the usage of "SYSTEM_TIME AS OF syntax used in temporal join with the latest version of any view/table." This is because the TemporalProcessTimeJoinOperator supports temporal joins based on processing time but does not support the Probe Side waiting for data from the Build Side in processing time mode. The operator may start processing the Probe Side's data before reading the data from the Build Side's snapshot phase, which can lead to situations where the Probe Side's data cannot be joined with any data, resulting in output that does not meet the user's requirements. For more details, you can refer to FLINK-19830.

This document proposes a new API and mechanism at the DataStream, allowing the Source (e.g., MySQL CDC Source) to send a watermark that allows that downstream operator to advance its event time base on the system time. In the temporal join operator, the probe side can wait for the build side until the build side receives the watermark to start advancing its event time base on system time.

Terminology and Background

The FLIP will make changes to Flink's watermark and timestamp concepts. To help understand the intuition behind the design, we will introduce the relevant concepts in this section.

Probe Side: The left side of the stream in a temporal join, sometimes referred to as the Fact Table. Usually, the data on the Probe Side doesn't need to be retained after processing.

Build Side: The right side of the stream in a temporal join, which can be a versioned table. It is also known as the Dimension Table. Typically, the Build Side has the latest data for each key.

Watermark: Inform operators that no elements with a timestamp older than or equal to the watermark timestamp should arrive at the operator.

TimestampAssigner: Assigns event time timestamps to elements. These timestamps are used by all functions that operate on event time, such as event time windows. Here is the TimestampAssigner interface:

public interface TimestampAssigner<T> {
    long extractTimestamp(T element, long recordTimestamp);
}

WatermarkGenerator: Generates watermarks either based on events or periodically. Here is the WatermarkGenerator interface:

@Public
public interface WatermarkGenerator<T> {
    void onEvent(T event, long eventTimestamp, WatermarkOutput output);
    void onPeriodicEmit(WatermarkOutput output);
}

For Flink DataStream jobs:

• When creating a source, user provides a WatermarkStrategy to StreamExecutionEnvironment#fromSource.

• If the the source supports event time natively (e.g., KafkaSource) or the user provides a custom TimestampAssigner in the WatermarkStrategy to extract the timestamp from the record, Flink will add the timestamp to the record. Otherwise, the timestamp on the record will be Long.MIN_VALUE.

• If the user uses noWatermarkGenerator in the WatermarkStrategy, the job will not generate watermarks. Otherwise, the job will periodically emit watermarks, and the watermark value depends on event time. The output frequency of watermarks is determined by pipeline.auto-watermark-interval, with a default value of 200ms.

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:

• DataStream and DataSet API, including classes related to that, such as StreamExecutionEnvironment

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

• 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?

Test Plan

Describe in few sentences how the FLIP will be tested. We are mostly interested in system tests (since unit-tests are specific to implementation details). How will we know that the implementation works as expected? How will we know nothing broke?

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.