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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-5568?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=15880245#comment-15880245
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Fabian Hueske commented on FLINK-5568:
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Thanks for the quick answer!

Regarding the last point (4.), couldn't we not just make this the 
responsibility of the catalog? It could have a method to look up the 
TableSource and Converter classes for a given table type. How the classes are 
configured would depend on the catalog and be outside of the responsibility of 
the Table API. 
When submitting the query to Flink, we would need to make sure that all 
required classes are bundled in the JAR file or present in the lib folder.

> Introduce interface for catalog, and provide an in-memory implementation, and 
> integrate with calcite schema
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: FLINK-5568
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-5568
>             Project: Flink
>          Issue Type: Sub-task
>          Components: Table API & SQL
>            Reporter: Kurt Young
>            Assignee: jingzhang
>
> The {{TableEnvironment}} now provides a mechanism to register temporary 
> table. It registers the temp table to calcite catalog, so SQL and TableAPI 
> queries can access to those temp tables. Now DatasetTable,  DataStreamTable 
> and TableSourceTable can be registered to  {{TableEnvironment}} as temporary 
> tables.
> This issue wants to provides a mechanism to connect external catalogs such as 
> HCatalog to the {{TableEnvironment}}, so SQL and TableAPI queries could 
> access to tables in the external catalogs without register those tables to 
> {{TableEnvironment}} beforehand.
> First, we should point out that there are two kinds of catalog in Flink 
> actually. 
> The first one is external catalog as we mentioned before, it provides CRUD 
> operations to databases/tables.
> The second one is calcite catalog, it defines namespace that can be accessed 
> in Calcite queries. It depends on Calcite Schema/Table abstraction. 
> SqlValidator and SqlConverter depends on the calcite catalog to fetch the 
> tables in SQL or TableAPI.
> So we need to do the following things:
> 1. introduce interface for external catalog, maybe provide an in-memory 
> implementation first for test and develop environment.
> 2. introduce a mechanism to connect external catalog with Calcite catalog so 
> the tables/databases in external catalog can be accessed in Calcite catalog. 
> Including convert databases of externalCatalog to Calcite sub-schemas, 
> convert tables in a database of externalCatalog to  Calcite tables (only 
> support {{TableSourceTable}}).
> 3. register external catalog to {{TableEnvironment}}.
> Here is the design mode of ExternalCatalogTable.
> |  identifier                      | TableIdentifier | dbName and tableName 
> of table |
> |  tableType                     | String | type of external catalog table, 
> e.g csv, hbase, kafka
> |  schema                        | DataSchema|  schema of table data, 
> including column names and column types
> | partitionColumnNames | List<String> | names of partition column
> | properties                      | Map<String, String> |properties of 
> external catalog table
> | stats                               | TableStats | statistics of external 
> catalog table 
> | comment | String | 
> | create time | long
> There is still a detail problem need to be take into consideration, that is , 
> how to convert  {{ExternalCatalogTable}} to {{TableSourceTable}}. The 
> question is equals to  convert  {{ExternalCatalogTable}} to {{TableSource}} 
> because we could  easily get {{TableSourceTable}} from {{TableSource}}.
> Because different {{TableSource}} often contains different fields to initiate 
> an instance. E.g. {{CsvTableSource}}  needs path, fieldName, fieldTypes, 
> fieldDelim, rowDelim and so on to create a new instance , 
> {{KafkaTableSource}} needs configuration and tableName to create a new 
> instance. So it's not a good idea to let Flink framework be responsible for 
> translate  {{ExternalCatalogTable}} to different kind of 
> {{TableSourceTable}}. 
> Here is one solution. Let {{TableSource}} specify a converter.
> 1. provide  an Annatition named {{ExternalCatalogCompatible}}. The 
> {{TableSource}} with the annotation means it is compatible with external 
> catalog, that is, it could be converted to or from ExternalCatalogTable. This 
> annotation specifies the tabletype and converter of the tableSource. For 
> example, for {{CsvTableSource}}, it specifies the tableType is csv and 
> converter class is CsvTableSourceConverter.
> {code}
> @ExternalCatalogCompatible(tableType = "csv", converter = 
> classOf[CsvTableSourceConverter])
> class CsvTableSource(...) {
> ...}
> {code}
> 2. Scan all TableSources with the ExternalCatalogCompatible annotation, save 
> the tableType and converter in a Map
> 3. When need to convert {{ExternalCatalogTable}} to {{TableSource}} , get the 
> converter based on tableType. and let converter do convert



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