Process Table Function¶

Features¶

• The TableAPI or SQL most powerful function API. Stateful.
• Access to Flink’s managed state, event-time and timer services, and underlying table changelogs

Use Cases¶

PTFs unlock use cases that can’t be expressed in a declarable way with either SQL or the Table API implementation. It serves a similar purposes compared to the ProcessFunction in Apache Flink’s Datastream API, giving primitives for handling the most common building blocks for stateful processing applications: events, state and timers.

• Apply transformations on each row of a table.
• Logically partition the table into distinct sets and apply transformations per set.
• Store seen events for repeated access.
• Continue the processing at a later point in time enabling waiting, synchronization, or timeouts.
• Buffer and aggregate events using complex state machines or rule-based conditional logic.

Sources¶

• Flink documentation
• Confluent documentation
• Martinjn Visser
• Satakshi Raj