Hey everyone, I'm wondering if anyone has done any experiments trying to use non-temporal watermarks? For example, a dataset may contain some kind of virtual timestamp / version field that behaves just like a regular timestamp (monotonically increasing, etc.), but has a different scale / range.
As far as I can see Flink assumes that the values used for event times and watermark generation are actually timestamps and the Table API requires you to define watermarks on TIMESTAMP columns. Practically speaking timestamp is just a number, so if I have a "timeline" that consists of 1000 monotonically increasing integers, for example, the concepts like late-arriving data, bounded-out-of-orderness, etc. still work. Thanks for sharing any thoughts you might have on this topic!
