I think my perception of Flink windows may be wrong, since they are not evaluated as I would expect from the documentation or the Flink book. The goal is to join a Kafka topic, which has rather static data, with a Kafka topic with constantly incoming data.
env.addSource(createKafkaConsumer())
.join(env.addSource((createKafkaConsumer()))))
.where(keySelector())
.equalTo(keySelector())
.window(TumblingProcessingTimeWindows.of(Time.hours(2)))
.apply(new RichJoinFunction<A, B>() { ... }
createKafkaConsumer() returns a FlinkKafkaConsumer
keySelector() is a placeholder for my key selector.
KafkaTopic A has 1 record, KafkaTopic B has 5. My understanding would be, that the JoinFunction is triggered 5 times (join condition is valid each time), resulting in 5 records in the sink. If a new record for topic A comes in within the 2 hours, another 5 records would be created (2x5 records). However, what comes through in the sink is rather unpredictable, I could not see a pattern. Sometimes there's nothing, sometimes the initial records, but if I send additional messages, they are not being processed by the join with prior records.
My key question:
What does even happen here? Are the records emitted after the window is done processing? I would expect a real-time output to the sink, but that would explain a lot.
Related to that:
Could I handle this problem with onElement trigger or would this make my TimeWindow obsolete? Do those two concepts exists parallel to each other, i.e. that the join window is 2 hours, but the join function + output is triggered per element? How about duplicates in that case?
Subsequently, does processing time mean the point in time, when the record is consumed from the topic? So if I e.g. setStartFromEarliest() on start, all messages which were consumed within the next two hours, were in that window?
Additional info:
env.setStreamTimeCharacteristic(TimeCharacteristic.ProcessingTime); is set and I also switched to EventTime in between.
The semantics of a tumbling processing time window is that it processes all events which fall into the given timespan. In your case, it is 2 hours. Per default, the window will only output results once the 2 hours are over because it needs to know that no other events will be coming for this window.
If you want to output early results (e.g. for every incoming record), then you could specify a custom Trigger which fires on every element. See the Trigger API docs for more information about this.
Update
The window time does not start with the first element but the window starts at multiples of the window length. For example, if your window size is 2 hours, then you can only have windows [0, 2), [2, 4), ... but not [1, 3), [3, 5).
Related
I was just reviewing the documentation to understand how Google Dataflow handles watermarks, and it just mentions the very vague:
The data source determines the watermark
It seems you can add more flexibility through withAllowedLateness but what will happen if we do not configure this?
Thoughts so far
I found something indicating that if your source is Google PubSub it already has a watermark which will get taken, but what if the source is something else? For example a Kafka topic (which I believe does not inherently have a watermark, so I don't see how something like this would apply).
Is it always 10 seconds, or just 0? Is it looking at the last few minutes to determine the max lag and if so how many (surely not since forever as that would get distorted by the initial start of processing which might see giant lag)? I could not find anything on the topic.
I also searched outside the context of Google DataFlow for Apache Beam documentation but did not find anything explaining this either.
When using Apache Kafka as a data source, each Kafka partition may have a simple event time pattern (ascending timestamps or bounded out-of-orderness). However, when consuming streams from Kafka, multiple partitions often get consumed in parallel, interleaving the events from the partitions and destroying the per-partition patterns (this is inherent in how Kafka’s consumer clients work).
In that case, you can use Flink’s Kafka-partition-aware watermark generation. Using that feature, watermarks are generated inside the Kafka consumer, per Kafka partition, and the per-partition watermarks are merged in the same way as watermarks are merged on stream shuffles.
For example, if event timestamps are strictly ascending per Kafka partition, generating per-partition watermarks with the ascending timestamps watermark generator will result in perfect overall watermarks. Note, that TimestampAssigner is not provided in the example, the timestamps of the Kafka records themselves will be used instead.
In any data processing system, there is a certain amount of lag between the time a data event occurs (the “event time”, determined by the timestamp on the data element itself) and the time the actual data element gets processed at any stage in your pipeline (the “processing time”, determined by the clock on the system processing the element). In addition, there are no guarantees that data events will appear in your pipeline in the same order that they were generated.
For example, let’s say we have a PCollection that’s using fixed-time windowing, with windows that are five minutes long. For each window, Beam must collect all the data with an event time timestamp in the given window range (between 0:00 and 4:59 in the first window, for instance). Data with timestamps outside that range (data from 5:00 or later) belong to a different window.
However, data isn’t always guaranteed to arrive in a pipeline in time order, or to always arrive at predictable intervals. Beam tracks a watermark, which is the system’s notion of when all data in a certain window can be expected to have arrived in the pipeline. Once the watermark progresses past the end of a window, any further element that arrives with a timestamp in that window is considered late data.
From our example, suppose we have a simple watermark that assumes approximately 30s of lag time between the data timestamps (the event time) and the time the data appears in the pipeline (the processing time), then Beam would close the first window at 5:30. If a data record arrives at 5:34, but with a timestamp that would put it in the 0:00-4:59 window (say, 3:38), then that record is late data.
I'm trying to implement a valueState to filter records in my ParDo transformation. The high level flow is this:
Fixed-Window of 1hr size, with allowedLateness (10min)
The first message (for a given key) that is processed in the ParDo shall set the valueState(boolean) to true. Subsequent messages for the same key shall be dropped if corresponding valueState is set to true. (Allow only first message for a given key in every window).
The messages (that are not dropped in step 2) will be written out as output.
While testing this however, I see that, after the Fixed window time-period ends (1hr), the state is reset/lost. Ideally, the state should be available to process late records until allowedLateness period (10min is complete).
These parts are right:
Each 1 hour window expires when the watermark reaches the end of the hour plus 10 minutes.
For a given window, the state is cleaned up after the window expires.
Here are the parts that I have corrections
State is never reset.
Elements with timestamps in different windows are processed totally independently. Many windows may be receiving data at the same time. Each hour window happened after another, when the data was generated. But it is not processed after the other.
Allowed lateness will not cause elements from a later window to be processed using the state from the prior window. It will simply allow the state to stay longer and the elements to not be dropped.
I am building the following Kafka Streams topology (pseudo code):
gK = builder.stream().gropuByKey();
g1 = gK.windowedBy(TimeWindows.of("PT1H")).reduce().mapValues().toStream().mapValues().selectKey();
g2 = gK.reduce().mapValues();
g1.leftJoin(g2).to();
If you notice, this is a rhomb-like topology that starts at single input topic and ends in the single output topic with messages flowing through two parallel flows that eventually get joined together at the end. One flow applies (tumbling?) windowing, the other does not. Both parts of the flow work on the same key (apart from the WindowedKey intermediately introduced by the windowing).
The timestamp for my messages is event-time. That is, they get picked from the message body by my custom configured TimestampExtractor implementation. The actual timestamps in my messages are several years to the past.
That all works well at first sight in my unit tests with a couple of input/output messages and in the runtime environment (with real Kafka).
The problem seems to come when the number of messages starts being significant (e.g. 40K).
My failing scenario is following:
~40K records with the same
key get uploaded into the input topic first
~40K updates are
coming out of the output topic, as expected
another ~40K records
with the same but different to step 1) key get uploaded into the
input topic
only ~100 updates are coming out of the output topic,
instead of expected new ~40K updates. There is nothing special to
see on those ~100 updates, their contents seems to be right, but
only for certain time windows. For other time windows there are no
updates even though the flow logic and input data should definetly
generate 40K records. In fact, when I exchange dataset in step 1)
and 3) I have exactly same situation with ~40K updates coming from
the second dataset and same number ~100 from the first.
I can easily reproduce this issue in the unit tests using TopologyTestDriver locally (but only on bigger numbers of input records).
In my tests, I've tried disabling caching with StreamsConfig.CACHE_MAX_BYTES_BUFFERING_CONFIG. Unfortunately, that didn't make any difference.
UPDATE
I tried both, reduce() calls and aggregate() calls instead. The issue persists in both cases.
What I'm noticing else is that with StreamsConfig.TOPOLOGY_OPTIMIZATION set to StreamsConfig.OPTIMIZE and without it, the mapValues() handler gets called in debugger before the preceding reduce() (or aggregate()) handlers at least for the first time. I didn't expect that.
Tried both join() and leftJoin() unfortunately same result.
In debugger the second portion of the data doesn't trigger reduce() handler in the "left" flow at all, but does trigger reduce() handler in the "right" flow.
With my configuration, if the number or records in both datasets is 100 in each, the problem doesn't manifests itself, I'm getting 200 output messages as I expect. When I raise the number to 200 in each data set, I'm getting less than 400 expected messages out.
So, it seems at the moment that something like "old" windows get dropped and the new records for those old windows get ignored by the stream.
There is window retention setting that can be set, but with its default value that I use I was expecting for windows to retain their state and stay active for at least 12 hours (what exceeds the time of my unit test run significantly).
Tried to amend the left reducer with the following Window storage config:
Materialized.as(
Stores.inMemoryWindowStore(
"rollup-left-reduce",
Duration.ofDays(5 * 365),
Duration.ofHours(1), false)
)
still no difference in results.
Same issue persists even with only single "left" flow without the "right" flow and without join(). It seems that the problem is in the window retention settings of my set up. Timestamps (event-time) of my input records span 2 years. The second dataset starts from the beginning of 2 years again. this place in Kafka Streams makes sure that the second data set records get ignored:
https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/streams/src/main/java/org/apache/kafka/streams/state/internals/InMemoryWindowStore.java#L125
Kafka Streams Version is 2.4.0. Also using Confluent dependencies version 5.4.0.
My questions are
What could be the reason for such behaviour?
Did I miss anything in my stream topology?
Is such topology expected to work at all?
After some debugging time I found the reason for my problem.
My input datasets contain records with timestamps that span 2 years. I am loading the first dataset and with that the "observed" time of my stream gets set to the maximum timestamp from from input data set.
The upload of the second dataset that starts with records with timestamps that are 2 years before the new observed time causes the stream internal to drop the messages. This can be seen if you set the Kafka logging to TRACE level.
So, to fix my problem I had to configure the retention and grace period for my windows:
instead of
.windowedBy(TimeWindows.of(windowSize))
I have to specify
.windowedBy(TimeWindows.of(windowSize).grace(Duration.ofDays(5 * 365)))
Also, I had to explicitly configure reducer storage settings as:
Materialized.as(
Stores.inMemoryWindowStore(
"rollup-left-reduce",
Duration.ofDays(5 * 365),
windowSize, false)
)
That's it, the output is as expected.
I have the following:
KTable<Integer, A> tableA = builder.table("A");
KStream<Integer, B> streamB = builder.stream("B");
Messages in streamB need to be enriched with data from tableA.
Example data:
Topic A: (1, {name=john})
Topic B: (1, {type=create,...}), (1, {type=update,...}), (1, {type=update...})
In a perfect world, I would like to do
streamB.join(tableA, (b, a) -> { b.name = a.name; return b; })
.selectKey((k,b) -> b.name)
.to("C");
Unfortunately this does not work for me because my data is such that every time a message is written to topic A, a corresponding message is also written to topic B (the source is a single DB transaction). Now after this initial 'creation' transaction topic B will keep receiving more messages. Sometimes several events per seconds will show up on topic B but it is also possible to have consecutive events hours apart for a given key.
The reason the simple solution does not work is that the original 'creation' transaction causes a race condition: Topic A and B get their message almost simultaneously and if the B message reaches the 'join' part of the topology first (say a few ms before the A message gets there) the tableA will not yet contain a corresponding entry. At this point the event is lost. I can see this happening on topic C: some events show up, some don't (if I use a leftJoin, all events show up but some have null key which is equivalent to being lost). This is only a problem for the initial 'creation' transaction. After that every time an event arrives on topic B, the corresponding entry exists in tableA.
So my question is: how do you fix this?
My current solution is ugly. What I do is that I created a 'collection of B' and read topic B using
B.groupByKey()
.aggregate(() -> new CollectionOfB(), (id, b, agg) -> agg.add(b));
.join(tableA, ...);
Now we have a KTable-KTable join, which is not susceptible to this race condition. The reason I consider this 'ugly' is because after each join, I have to send a special message back to topic B that essentially says "remove the event(s) that I just processed from the collection". If this special message is not sent to topic B, the collection will keep growing and every event in the collection will be reported on every join.
Currently I'm investigating whether a window join would work (read both A and B into KStreams and use a windowed join). I'm not sure that this will work either because there is no upper bound on the size of the window. I want to say, "window starts 1 second 'before' and ends infinity seconds 'after'". Even if I can somehow make this work, I am a bit concerned with the space requirement of having an unbounded window.
Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.
Not sure what version you are using, but latest Kafka 2.1 improves the stream-table-join. Even before 2.1, the following holds:
stream-table join is base on event-time
Kafka Streams processes messages based on event-time, however, in offset-order (for two input streams, the stream with smaller record timestamps is processed first)
if you want to ensure that the table is updated first, the table update record should have a smaller timestamp than the stream record
Since 2.1:
to allow for some delay, you can configure max.task.idle.ms configuration to delay processing for the case that only one input topic has input data
The event-time processing order is implemented as best-effort in 2.0 and earlier versions what can lead to the race condition you describe. In 2.1, processing order is guaranteed and might only be violated if max.task.idle.ms hits.
For details, see https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-353%3A+Improve+Kafka+Streams+Timestamp+Synchronization
I have time series data in Kafka. The schema is quite simple - the key is the channel name, and the values are Long/Double tuples of the timestamp and the value (in reality it's a custom Avro object but it boils down to this). They always come in correct chronological order.
The wanted end result is data packaged in 10 minute batches, aligned at 10 minutes (i.e., 00:00 < t <= 00:10, 00:10 < t <= 00:20, ..., 23: 50 < t <= 00:00). Each package is to contain only data of one channel.
My idea is to have two Spark Streaming jobs. The first one takes the data from the Kafka topics and dumps it to a table in a Cassandra database where the key is the timestamp and the channel name, and every time such an RDD hits a 10 minute boundary, this boundary is posted to another topic, alongside the channel whose boundary is hit.
The second job listens to this "boundary topic", and for every received 10 minute boundary, the data is pulled from Cassandra, some calculations like min, max, mean, stddev are done and the data and these results are packaged to a defined output directory. That way, each directory contains the data from one channel and one 10 minute window.
However, this looks a bit clunky and like a lot of extra work to me. Is this a feasible solution or are there any other more efficient tricks to it, like some custom windowing of the Kafka data?
I agree with your intuition that this solution is clunky. How about simply using the time windowing functionality built into the Streams DSL?
http://kafka.apache.org/11/documentation/streams/developer-guide/dsl-api.html#windowing
The most natural output would be a new topic containing the windowed aggregations, but if you really need it written to a directory that should be possible with Kafka Connect.
I work with the Flink Stream Processing, not Spark-streaming but I guess the programming concept of both of them is alike. So supposing data are ordered chronologically and you want to aggregate data for every 10 minutes and do some processing on aggregated data, I think the best approach is to use the Streaming Window Functions. I suggest to define a function to map every incoming data's timestamp to the last 10 minutes:
12:10:24 ----> 12:10:00
12:10:30 ----> 12:10:00
12:25:24 ----> 12:20:00
So you can create a keyed stream object like:
StreamObject<Long, Tuple<data>>
That the Long field is the mapped timestamp of every message. Then you can apply a window. You should search what kind of window is more appropriate for your case.
Point: Setting a key for the data stream will cause the window function to consider a logical window for every key.
In the most simple case, you should define a time window of 10 minutes and aggregate all data incoming on that period of time.
The other approach, if you know the rate of generating of data and how many messages will be generated in a period of 10 minutes, is to use Count window. For example, a window with the count of 20 will listen to the stream and aggregate all the messages with the same key in a logical window and apply the window function just when the number of messages in the window reaches 20.
After messages aggregated in a window as desired, you could apply your processing logic using a reduce function or some action like that.