Hi Tisya, Overall, the FLIP looks good to me.
1. As a small note, $rowtime may be specific to Confluent Cloud and/or tables using the Kafka connector. 2. For the Calcite dependencies, will you be able to copy the work for CALCITE-7594, 7597, and 7647 into the Flink codebase or will a release be required? (The FLIP seems to suggest the latter.) Looks like you've got a good handle on many of the corner and edge cases. Cheers, Jim On Tue, Jul 14, 2026 at 1:18 PM Tisya Bhatia via dev <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I'd like to start a discussion on a FLIP that adds three SQL ergonomics > features to Flink SQL: GROUP BY <ordinal>, GROUP BY ALL, and ORDER BY ALL. > > FLIP: > > https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://docs.google.com/document/d/16R83T86X1ATmmPe_QFnnUMdnpiOcvyMrUOOctmm59Gk/edit?usp=sharing__;!!Ayb5sqE7!qoWB3uMUCCZwcI5ZhS1Rje-44Bqi6oqmZH3bmz_AzEUololczRs1hWZIUWPCXIxWbRjtGAnbuYQYZnljHwg$ > > *Motivation* > Users migrating to Flink SQL from Snowflake, DuckDB, BigQuery, and others > expect positional grouping and ALL grouping/sorting. Their absence forces > query rewrites during migration and raises time-to-first-query. These are > validation-time conveniences that expand into standard grouping/sorting, so > the planning and execution pipeline is unchanged across streaming and > batch. > > *Summary* > - GROUP BY <ordinal>: "GROUP BY 1, 2" groups by the 1st and 2nd SELECT > expressions. This redefines today's "GROUP BY <constant>" behavior, so it > is a breaking change - gated behind a config option, default off. It reuses > Calcite's existing isGroupByOrdinal() resolution, no custom code. > - GROUP BY ALL: groups by every SELECT expression that is not an aggregate > or window function. > - ORDER BY ALL: sorts by every projected column, left to right, with an > optional trailing ASC/DESC and NULLS FIRST/NULLS LAST applied to all keys. > > All three features are gated behind Boolean options in TableConfigOptions, > default false, for a staged rollout. With the options off, behavior is > unchanged. > > GROUP BY ALL and ORDER BY ALL are net-new syntax and depend on Calcite > changes already merged upstream (CALCITE-7594 > < > https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://github.com/apache/calcite/pull/5009__;!!Ayb5sqE7!qoWB3uMUCCZwcI5ZhS1Rje-44Bqi6oqmZH3bmz_AzEUololczRs1hWZIUWPCXIxWbRjtGAnbuYQYPqYIsN8$ > >, CALCITE-7597 > < > https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://github.com/apache/calcite/pull/5010__;!!Ayb5sqE7!qoWB3uMUCCZwcI5ZhS1Rje-44Bqi6oqmZH3bmz_AzEUololczRs1hWZIUWPCXIxWbRjtGAnbuYQYGoDhKMo$ > >), targeted for Calcite > 1.43.0; SELECT * support in both is in review (CALCITE-7647 > < > https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://github.com/apache/calcite/pull/5089__;!!Ayb5sqE7!qoWB3uMUCCZwcI5ZhS1Rje-44Bqi6oqmZH3bmz_AzEUololczRs1hWZIUWPCXIxWbRjtGAnbuYQY5CzySdI$ > >). Because of this, the GROUP > BY ALL / ORDER BY ALL parts of this FLIP once it upgrades its Calcite > dependency to a release that includes these changes. The FLIP itself can be > discussed and accepted now; merging / releasing those two features is gated > by that Calcite upgrade. GROUP BY <ordinal> has no such dependency - it > reuses Calcite functionality that already exists. > > Thanks, > Tisya Bhatia >
