Hi Danny, Thanks for starting this discussion.
Big +1 for this feature. Both CTAS AND CREATE TABLE LIKE are very useful features. IMO, it is clear to separate them into two parts in the `syntax` character. 😀 First, I have two related problems: 1. Would `create table` in CTAS trigger to create a physical table in external storage system? For example, now normal `create table` would only define a connecting with an existed external Kafka topic instead of trigger to create a physical kafka topic in kafka cluster. Does this behavior still work for CTAS AND CREATE TABLE LIKE? 2. Would the data sync of CTAS run continuously if select works on a unbounded source? Since sub select query may works on unbounded source in Flink, which is different with other system (postgres, spark, hive, mysql). Does data sync continuously run or just sync the snapshot at the job submit? Besides, I have some minor problems which is mentioned in your email. > how to write data into existing table with history data declare [IF NOT EXISTS] keywords and we ignore the table creation but the pipeline still starts up Maybe we should check old schema and new schema. What would happen if schema of existed table is different with new schema? > How to match sub-database and sub-table ? Use regex style source table name 1. What would happen if schema of matched tables different with each other? 2. What orders to sync data of all matched table? Sync data from all matched tables one by one or at the same time? > AS select_statement: copy source table data into target User could explicitly specify the data type for each column in the CTAS, what happened when run the following example. The demo is from MySQL document, https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/create-table-select.html, the result is a bit unexpected, I wonder What the behavior would be in Flink. [image: image.png] Best, JING ZHANG
