I think there is some confusion in this thread between the auto watermark interval and the interval (length) of an event-time window. Maybe clearing that up for everyone helps.

The auto watermark interval is the periodicity (in processing time) at which Flink asks the source (or a watermark generator) what the current watermark is. The source will keep track of the timestamps that it can "respond" to Flink when it asks. For example, if the auto watermark interval is set to 1 sec, Flink will update the watermark information every second. This doesn't mean, though, that the watermark advances 1 sec in that time. If you're reading through some historic data the watermark could jump by hours in between those 1 second intervals. You can also think of this as the sampling interval for updating the current watermark.

The window size size independent of the auto watermark interval, you can have an arbitrary size here. The auto watermark interval only controls how frequent Flink will check and emit the contents of windows, if their end timestamp is below the watermark.

I hope that helps. If we're all clear we can look at the concrete problem again.

Best,
Aljoscha

On 30.04.20 12:46, Manas Kale wrote:
Hi Timo and Piotrek,
Thank you for the suggestions.
I have been trying to set up unit tests at the operator granularity, and
the blog post's testHarness examples certainly help a lot in this regard.

I understood my problem - an upstream session window operator can only
report the end of the session window when the watermark has passed
{lastObserverEvent + sessionTimeout}. However, my watermark was being
updated periodically without taking this into account. It seems I will have
to delay this notification operator's watermark by sessionTimeout.
Another complication is that this sessionTimeout is per-key, so I guess I
will have to implement a watermark assigner that extracts the delay period
from data (similar to DynamicEventTimeWindows).

Also, if I do implement such an assigner, would it be helpful to add it to
Flink? I am happy to contribute if so. Any other comments/observations are
also welcome!

Thank you all for the help,
Manas


On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 3:39 PM Piotr Nowojski <pi...@ververica.com> wrote:

Hi Manas,

Adding to the response from Timo, if you don’t have unit tests/integration
tests, I would strongly recommend setting them up, as it makes debugging
and testing easier. You can read how to do it for your functions and
operators here [1] and here [2].

Piotrek

[1]
https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-stable/dev/stream/testing.html
[2]
https://flink.apache.org/news/2020/02/07/a-guide-for-unit-testing-in-apache-flink.html

On 28 Apr 2020, at 18:45, Timo Walther <twal...@apache.org> wrote:

Hi Manas,

Reg. 1: I would recommend to use a debugger in your IDE and check which
watermarks are travelling through your operators.

Reg. 2: All event-time operations are only performed once the watermark
arrived from all parallel instances. So roughly speaking, in machine time
you can assume that the window is computed in watermark update intervals.
However, "what is computed" depends on the timestamps of your events and
how those are categorized in windows.

I hope this helps a bit.

Regards,
Timo

On 28.04.20 14:38, Manas Kale wrote:

Hi David and Piotrek,
Thank you both for your inputs.
I tried an implementation with the algorithm Piotrek suggested and David's
example. Although notifications are being generated with the watermark,
subsequent transition events are being received after the watermark has
crossed their timestamps. For example:
state1 @ 100
notification state1@ 110
notification state1@ 120
notification state1@ 130    <----- shouldn't have emitted this
state2 @ 125                     <----- watermark is > 125 at this stage
I think something might be subtly(?) wrong with how I have structured
upstream operators. The allowed lateness is 0 in the watermarkassigner
upstream, and I generate watermarks every x seconds.
The operator that emits state transitions is constructed using the
TumblingWindow approach I described in the first e-mail (so that I can
compute at every watermark update). Note that I can use this approach for
state-transition-operator because it only wants to emit transitions, and
nothing in between.
So, two questions:
1. Any idea on what might be causing this incorrect watermark behaviour?
2. If I want to perform some computation only when the watermark updates,
is using a watermark-aligned EventTimeTumblingWindow (meaning
windowDuration = watermarkUpdateInterval) the correct way to do this?
Regards,
Manas
On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 2:16 AM David Anderson <da...@ververica.com <
mailto:da...@ververica.com <da...@ververica.com>>> wrote:
    Following up on Piotr's outline, there's an example in the
    documentation of how to use a KeyedProcessFunction to implement an
    event-time tumbling window [1]. Perhaps that can help you get started.
    Regards,
    David
    [1]

https://ci.apache.org/projects/flink/flink-docs-master/tutorials/event_driven.html#example
    On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 7:47 PM Piotr Nowojski <pi...@ververica.com
    <mailto:pi...@ververica.com <pi...@ververica.com>>> wrote:
        Hi,
        I’m not sure, but I don’t think there is an existing window that
        would do exactly what you want. I would suggest to go back to
        the `keyedProcessFunction` (or a custom operator?), and have a
        MapState<TimeStamp, StateWithTimeStamp> currentStates field.
        Your key would be for example a timestamp of the beginning of
        your window. Value would be the latest state in this time
        window, annotated with a timestamp when this state was record.
        On each element:
        1. you determine the window’s begin ts (key of the map)
        2. If it’s first element, register an event time timer to
        publish results for that window’s end TS
        3. look into the `currentStates` if it should be modified (if
        your new element is newer or first value for the given key)
        On even time timer firing
        1. output the state matching to this timer
        2. Check if there is a (more recent) value for next window, and
        if not:
        3. copy the value to next window
        4. Register a timer for this window to fire
        5. Cleanup currentState and remove value for the no longed
        needed key.
        I hope this helps
        Piotrek

        On 27 Apr 2020, at 12:01, Manas Kale <manaskal...@gmail.com
        <mailto:manaskal...@gmail.com <manaskal...@gmail.com>>> wrote:

        Hi,
        I have an upstream operator that outputs device state
        transition messages with event timestamps. Meaning it only
        emits output when a transition takes place.
        For example,
        state1 @ 1 PM
        state2 @ 2 PM
        and so on.

        *Using a downstream operator, I want to emit notification
        messages as per some configured periodicity.* For example, if
        periodicity = 20 min, in the above scenario this operator will
        output :
        state1 notification @ 1PM
        state1 notification @ 1.20PM
        state1 notification @ 1.40PM
         ...

        *Now the main issue is that I want this to be driven by the
        /watermark /and not by transition events received from
        upstream. *Meaning I would like to see notification events as
        soon as the watermark crosses their timestamps; /not/ when the
        next transition event arrives at the operator (which could be
        hours later, as above).

        My first solution, using a keyedProcessFunction and timers did
        not work as expected because the order in which transition
        events arrived at this operator was non-deterministic. To
        elaborate, assume a setAutoWatermarkInterval of 10 second.
        If we get transition events :
        state1 @ 1sec
        state2 @ 3 sec
        state3 @ 5 sec
        state1 @ 8 sec
        the order in which these events arrived at my
        keyedProcessFunction was not fixed. To solve this, these
        messages need to be sorted on event time, which led me to my
        second solution.

        My second solution, using a EventTimeTumblingWindow with size
        = setAutoWatermarkInterval, also does not work. I sorted
        accumulated events in the window and applied
        notification-generation logic on them in order. However, I
        assumed that windows are created even if there are no
        elements. Since this is not the case, this solution generates
        notifications only when the next state tranisition message
        arrives, which could be hours later.

        Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can implement this?
        Thanks!





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