Hi devs, I’d like to start a discussion around FLIP-521: Integrating Variant Type into Flink: Enabling Efficient Semi-Structured Data Processing[1]. Working with semi-structured data has long been a foundational scenario of the Lakehouse. While JSON has traditionally served as the primary storage format for such data, its implementation as serialized strings introduces significant inefficiencies.
In this FLIP, we integrate the Variant encoding, which is a compact binary representation of semi-structured data[2], to improve the performance of processing semi-structured data. As Paimon has supported the Variant type recently[3], this FLIP would allow Flink to further leverage Paimon's storage-layer optimizations, improving performance and resource utilization for semi-structured data pipelines. Best, Xuannan [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-521%3A+Integrating+Variant+Type+into+Flink%3A+Enabling+Efficient+Semi-Structured+Data+Processing [2] https://github.com/apache/parquet-format/blob/master/VariantEncoding.md [3] https://github.com/apache/paimon/issues/4471
