Hi everyone, FLIP-84 [1] added the concept of a "statement set" to group multiple INSERT INTO statements (SQL or Table API) together. The statements in a statement set are jointly optimized and executed as a single Flink job.
I would like to start a discussion about a SQL syntax to group multiple INSERT INTO statements in a statement set. The use case would be to expose the statement set feature to a solely text based client for Flink SQL such as Flink's SQL CLI [1]. During the discussion of FLIP-84, we had briefly talked about such a syntax [3]. START STATEMENT SET; INSERT INTO ... SELECT ...; INSERT INTO ... SELECT ...; ... END STATEMENT SET; We didn't follow up on this proposal, to keep the focus on the FLIP-84 Table API changes and to not dive into a discussion about multiline SQL query support [4]. While this feature is clearly based on multiple SQL queries, I think it is a bit different from what we usually understand as multiline SQL support. That's because a statement set ends up to be a single Flink job. Hence, there is no need on the Flink side to coordinate the execution of multiple jobs (incl. the discussion about blocking or async execution of queries). Flink would treat the queries in a STATEMENT SET as a single query. I would like to start a discussion about supporting the [START|END] STATEMENT SET syntax (or a different syntax with equivalent semantics) in Flink. I don't have a strong preference whether this should be implemented in Flink's SQL core or be a purely client side implementation in the CLI client. It would be good though to have parser support in Flink for this. What do others think? [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=134745878 [2] https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-stable/dev/table/sqlClient.html [3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ueLjQWRPdLTFB_TReAyhseAX-1N3j4WYWD0F02Uau0E/edit#heading=h.al86t1h4ecuv [4] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rf494e227c47010c91583f90eeaf807d3a4c3eb59d105349afd5fdc31%40%3Cdev.flink.apache.org%3E
