Thanks, great news! Are there plans to get ProcessContinuation from the 
original proposal into the API?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Using watermarks with bounded sources
Local Time: June 20, 2017 7:52 PM
UTC Time: June 20, 2017 11:52 PM
From: [email protected]
To: peay <[email protected]>, [email protected] <[email protected]>
[email protected] <[email protected]>

Hi!

The PR just got submitted. You can play with SDF in Dataflow streaming runner 
now :) Hope it doesn't get rolled back (fingers crossed)...

On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 6:06 PM Eugene Kirpichov <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi,
The PR is ready and I'm just struggling with setup of tests - Dataflow 
ValidatesRunner tests currently don't have a streaming execution.
I think [+Kenn Knowles](mailto:[email protected]) was doing something about that, 
or I might find a workaround.

But basically if you want to experiment - if you patch in the PR, you can 
experiment with SDF in Dataflow in streaming mode. It passes tests against the 
current production Dataflow Service.

On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 8:54 AM peay <[email protected]> wrote:
Eugene, would you have an ETA on when splittable DoFn would be available in 
Dataflow in batch/streaming mode? I see that 
https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/1898 is still active

I've started to experiment with those using the DirectRunner and this is a 
great API.

Thanks!

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Using watermarks with bounded sources
Local Time: April 23, 2017 10:18 AM
UTC Time: April 23, 2017 2:18 PM
From: [email protected]
To: Eugene Kirpichov <[email protected]>
[email protected] <[email protected]>

Ah, I didn't know about that. This is *really* great -- from a quick look, the 
API looks both very natural and very powerful. Thanks a lot for getting this 
into Beam!

I see Flink support seems to have been merged already. Any idea on when 
https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/1898 will get merged?

I see updateWatermark in the API but not in the proposal's examples which only 
uses resume/withFutureOutputWatermark. Any reason why updateWatermark is not 
called after each output in the examples from the proposal? I guess that would 
be "too fined-grained" to update it for each individual record of a mini-batch?

In my case with existing hourly files, would `outputElement(01:00 file), 
updateWatermark(01:00), outputElement(02:00), updateWatermark(02:00), ...` be 
the proper way to output per-hour elements while gradually moving the watermark 
forward while going through an existing list? Or would you instead suggest to 
still use resume (potentially with were small timeouts)?

Thanks,

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Using watermarks with bounded sources
Local Time: 22 April 2017 3:59 PM
UTC Time: 22 April 2017 19:59
From: [email protected]
To: peay <[email protected]>, [email protected] <[email protected]>

Hi! This is an excellent question; don't have time to reply in much detail 
right now, but please take a look at http://s.apache.org/splittable-do-fn - it 
unifies the concepts of bounded and unbounded sources, and the use case you 
mentioned is one of the motivating examples.

Also, see recent discussions on pipeline termination semantics: technically 
nothing should prevent an unbounded source from saying it's done "for real" (no 
new data will appear), just the current UnboundedSource API does not expose 
such a method. (but Splittable DoFn does)

On Sat, Apr 22, 2017 at 11:15 AM peay <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello,

A use case I find myself running into frequently is the following: I have daily 
or hourly files, and a Beam pipeline with a small to moderate size windows. 
(Actually, I've just seen that support for per-window files support in file 
based sinks was recently checked in, which is one way to get there).

Now, Beam has no clue about the fact that each file corresponds to a given time 
interval. My understanding is that when running the pipeline in batch mode with 
a bounded source, there is no notion watermark and we have to load everything 
because we just don't know. This is pretty wasteful, especially as you have to 
keep a lot of data in memory, while you could in principle operate close to 
what you'd do in streaming mode: first read the oldest files, then newest 
files, moving the watermark forward as you go through the input list of files.

I see one way around this. Let's say that I have hourly files and let's not 
assume anything about the order of records within the file to keep it simple: I 
don't want a very precise record-level watermark, but more a rough watermark at 
the granularity of hours. Say we can easily get the corresponding time interval 
from the filename. One can make an unbounded source that essentially acts as a 
"List of bounded file-based sources". If there are K splits, split k can read 
every file that has `index % K == k` in the time-ordered list of files. 
`advance` can advance the current file, and move on to the next one if no 
records were read.

However, as far as I understand, this pipeline will never terminate since this 
is an unbounded source and having the `advance` method of our wrapping source 
return `false` won't make the pipeline terminate. Can someone confirm if this 
is correct? If yes, what would be ways to work around that? There's always the 
option to throw to make the pipeline fail, but this is far from ideal.

Thanks,

Reply via email to