Hi Flavio, I thought a bit about your proposal. I am not sure if it is actually necessary to integrate a central source repository into Flink. It should be possible to offer this as an external service which is based on the recently added TableSource interface. TableSources could be extended to be able to serialize and descerialize their configuration to/from JSON. When the external repository service starts, it can read the JSON fields and instantiate and register TableSource objectes. The repository could also hold metadata about the sources and serve a (web) UI to list available source. When a Flink program wants to access a data source which is registered in the repository, it could lookup the respective TableSouce object from the repository.
Given that an integration of metadata with Flink user functions (point 2. in your proposal) is a very special requirement, I am not sure how much "native" support should be added to Flink. Would it be possible to add a lineage tag to each record and ship the metadata of all sources as broadcast set to each operator? Then user functions could lookup the metadata from the broadcast set. Best, Fabian 2016-04-29 12:49 GMT+02:00 Flavio Pompermaier <pomperma...@okkam.it>: > Hi to all, > > as discussed briefly with Fabian, for our products in Okkam we need a > central repository of DataSources processed by Flink. > With respect to existing external catalogs, such as Hive or Confluent's > SchemaRegistry, whose objective is to provide necessary metadata to > read/write the registered tables, we would also need a way to acess to > other general metadata (e.g. name, description, creator, creation date, > lastUpdate date, processedRecords, certificationLevel of provided data, > provenance, language, etc). > > This integration has 2 main goals: > > 1. In a UI: to enable the user to choose (or even create) a datasource > to process with some task (e.g. quality assessment) and then see its > metadata (name, description, creator user, etc) > 2. During a Flink job: when 2 datasource gets joined and we have > multiple values for an attribute (e.g. name or lastname) we can access the > datasource metadata to decide which value to retain (e.g. the one coming > from the most authoritative/certified source for that attribute) > > We also think that this could be of interest for projects like Apache > Zeppelin or Nifi enabling them to suggest to the user the sources to start > from. > > Do you think it makes sense to think about designing such a module for > Flink? > > Best, > Flavio >
