The "Emitting watermarks" feature can't be used in flink sql?

[yeezychao]

Query engine

flink 1.18.0

Question

Hi @stevenzwu In the latest version, use flink sql still cannot define watermarks. This is still not possible when our company wants to use flink sql to implement window aggregation to process ODS data. Are there plans to support this?

[pvary]

@yeezychao: The feature should be available in Iceberg 1.5.0. Here is the PR, and there is an example there: #9346.

Please let us know, if it is not working.

[pvary]

Also, here is the documentation which describes what this feature can and can't do: https://iceberg.apache.org/docs/nightly/flink-queries/#emitting-watermarks

[yeezychao]

@pvary Thank you for your reply. I understand what you mean and I have also read the doc. However, we want to implement a function similar to this demo and need to use flink sql for TUMBLE window aggregation. If you run window calculations by specifying the watermark field through options, I will get an exception.
org.apache.flink.client.program.ProgramInvocationException: The main method caused an error: Window aggregate can only be defined over a time attribute column, but TIMESTAMP(3) encountered.Because it is not defined by WATERMARK FOR rowtime_column_name AS watermark_strategy_expression
Therefore, I think this implementation can only be used under Flink Data StreamAPI, Table&SQL API are not supported yet.

[pvary]

@yeezychao: Do you happen to know, what is needed from the connector side to make this work?

[yeezychao]

@pvary I'm confused why computed columns and watermark specs are not supported in the FlinkCatalog.java code.

[pvary]

What would be needed to support them?
I am guessing that this would be a Flink specific conversion between the Iceberg table and the Flink table. Am I right here?

[yeezychao]

@pvary You're right!

[yeezychao]

IcebergTableSource should implement the SupportsWatermarkPushDown interface like Kafka to implement Watermark pushdown. Can you give some suggestions? @hililiwei @stevenzwu

[pvary]

Maybe we could just implement the interface with the IcebergTableSource. We either prevent setting a watermark strategy which is not noWatermarks (cleaner approach, but might not work, if the watermark strategy is reused somewhere else to change some behavior), or create a new watermark strategy in createFLIP27Stream, where the watermark generation part is noWatermark, and only the timestamp generation part is reused. If we pass this watermark strategy to the fromSource, then we might be able to make things work.

Sadly I don't have the bandwidth to test this out, but if you want to take a stab at it, I can review your PR.

Thanks, Peter