Hi Tisya,
thanks for the FLIP and thank you for contributing to Apache Calcite to
make this feature available. Overall I'm +1 on this. All major moderns
SQL vendors seem to support GROUP BY ALL and ordinal positions.
Snowflake, Databricks SQL, DuckDB, Google BigQuery, ClickHouse to name a
few.
Ordinal support is even broader incl. Postgres and MySQL, Oracle.
I would suggest that we enable it by default going forward. It should be
very uncommon to group by constants, what do others think?
Cheers,
Timo
On 20.07.26 20:02, Jim Hughes via dev wrote:
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
