Hi Padarn, What you describe is essentially publishing Flink's watermarks to an outside system. Flink processes time windows, by waiting for a watermark that's past the window end time. When it receives such a WM it processes and emits all ended windows and forwards the watermark. When a sink received a WM for say 12:45:15, you know that all window results with until 12:45:00 have been emitted. Hence, the watermark tells you about the completeness of data.
However, using this information is not so easy, mostly because of the failure semantics. Things become much easier if you produce to Kafka with exactly-once semantics. In that case, you could have a ProcessFunction that is chained before the sink and which counts the window results per time slice and emits the result when the watermark passes to a side output. All side output messages are collected by a single task and can be published to a Kafka topic or even be made available via Queryable State. For at-least once output, it's much harder because you'll have duplicates in the output after a job recovered. Best, Fabian I think you have two options to let the consuming app know about the progress. You can either The ProcessFunction could count per window end timestamp how many records passed and forward that information via a side output. You could then Essentially, you'd like to publish Flink's watermarks to an outside system (possibly via Kafka). Am Mo., 12. Aug. 2019 um 14:33 Uhr schrieb Padarn Wilson <pad...@gmail.com>: > Hello Users, > > I have a question that is perhaps not best solved within Flink: It has to > do with notifying a downstream application that a Flink window has > completed. > > The (simplified) scenario is this: > - We have a Flink job that consumes from Kafka, does some preprocessing, > and then has a sliding window of 10 minutes and slide time of 1 minute. > - The number of keys in each slide is not fixed > - The output of the window is then output to Kafka, which is read by a > downstream application. > > What I want to achieve is that the downstream application can someone know > when it has read all of the data for a single window, without waiting for > the next window to arrive. > > Some options I've considered: > - Producing a second window over the window results that counts the output > size, which can then be used by the downstream application to see when it > has received the same number: This seems fragile, as there it relies on > there being no loss or duplication of data. Its also an extra window and > Kafka stream which is a tad messy. > - Somehow adding an 'end of window' element to each partitions of the > Kafka topic which can be read by the consumer: This seems a bit messy > because it mixes different types of events into the same Kafka stream, and > there is no really simple way to do this in Flink > - Package the whole window output into a single message and make this the > unit of transaction: This is possible, but the message would be quite large > then (at least 10s of mb), as the volume of this stream is quite large. > - Assume that if the consumer has no elements to read, or if the next > window has started to be read, then it has read the whole window: This > seems reasonable, and if it wasn't for the fact that my consumer on the > application end was a bit inflexible right now, it is probably the solution > I would use. > > Any further/better ideas? > > Thanks > Padarn >
