Hi all, Currently, I am working on adding support for nested fields filter push down. In our use case running Flink on Batch, we found nested fields filter push down is key - without it, it is significantly slow. Note: Spark SQL supports nested fields filter push down.
While debugging the code using IcebergTableSource as the table source, narrowed down the issue to missing support for RexNodeExtractor#RexNodeToExpressionConverter#visitFieldAccess. As part of fixing it, I made changes by returning an Option(FieldReferenceExpression) with appropriate reference to the parent index and the child index for the nested field with the data type info. But this new ResolvedExpression cannot be converted to RexNode which happens in PushFilterIntoSourceScanRuleBase <https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/3f63e03e83144e9857834f8db1895637d2aa218a/flink-table/flink-table-planner/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/table/planner/plan/rules/logical/PushFilterIntoSourceScanRuleBase.java#L104> . Few questions 1. Does FieldReferenceExpression support nested fields currently or should it be extended to support nested fields? I couldn't figure this out from the PushProjectIntoTableScanRule that supports nested column projection push down. 2. ExpressionConverter <https://github.com/apache/flink/blob/3f63e03e83144e9857834f8db1895637d2aa218a/flink-table/flink-table-planner/src/main/java/org/apache/flink/table/planner/expressions/converter/ExpressionConverter.java#L197> converts ResolvedExpression -> RexNode but the new FieldReferenceExpression with the nested field cannot be converted to RexNode. This is why the answer to the 1st question is key. 3. Anything else that I'm missing here? or is there an even easier way to add support for nested fields filter push down? Partially working changes - Commit <https://github.com/venkata91/flink/commit/00cdf34ecf9be3ba669a97baaed4b69b85cd26f9> Please feel free to leave a comment directly in the commit. Any pointers here would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance. Disclaimer: Relatively new to Flink code base especially Table planner :-). Regards Venkata krishnan