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FLINK NOTIONS OF TIME

Notions of time​

NotionDescriptionUse caseExample
Event timeTimestamp of when an event occurred, as recorded by the producing or storing device.Reproducible results, historical data analysis, or time-based calculationsStock prices during a time window
Ingestion timetimestamp recorded by Flink at the moment it ingests the eventQuick prototyping or debugging when event time is unavailable or irrelevant
Processing timeTime when a specific operator in the pipeline processes the event (system clock of the operator)Suitable for applications where low-latency processing is more important than exact time accuracyMonitoring

Lateness​

Lateness is defined relative to the watermarks. AĀ Watermark(t)Ā asserts that the stream is complete up through timeĀ t; any event following this watermark whose timestamp is ≤ tĀ is late.

Working with WatermarksĀ #​

In order to perform event-time-based event processing, Flink needs to know the time associated with each event, and it also needs the stream to include watermarks.

The Taxi data sources used in the hands-on exercises take care of these details for you. But in your own applications you will have to take care of this yourself, which is usually done by implementing a class that extracts the timestamps from the events, and generates watermarks on demand. The easiest way to do this is by using aĀ WatermarkStrategy:

Further ReadingĀ #​


References​