Github user StephanEwen commented on the pull request:
https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/867#issuecomment-116520207
@Shiti No need to apologize, that is all right. We are discussing a tricky
thing here...
It is true, right now, one needs to be aware of missing values in the
application logic. I personally like that, an `Option` makes it very explicit
and easy to grasp. Also the byte overhead for the option field is okay, as most
fields will not be nullable and not carry this overhead. The serialization
logic is also more CPU efficient that way.
What is true is that there is a problem when converting from a `Table` to a
`DataSet[Tuple]`. Tables with nullable fields could only be converted to data
sets of class types, which would support nullable fields.
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