[ANNOUNCE] Weekly Community Update 2020/37

[Konstantin Knauf-3]

Dear community, 

happy to share a belated update for the past week. This time with the release of Flink 1.11.2, a couple of discussions and FLIPs on improving Flink's APIs and dropping some baggage, most notably Scala 2.11, a new unified sink API and a bit more.

Flink Development

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* [releases] The vote for Flink 1.11.2 has passed today. Release announcement will follow shortly. [1] 

* [releases] Feature Freeze for Stateful Function 2.2.0 happened as planned five days ago. Release candidate is expected soon. [2]

* [apis] Seth has started a discussion to drop Scala 2.11. Many in favor so far. [3]

* [apis] Seth proposes to separate the concepts of "Statebackend" and "Checkpointing" in Flink's APIs. So far, the statebackend (RocksDB vs Heap-Based) and checkpointing storage (usually a distributed file system) are handled by the same classes and configured together. He believes this is the reason for some of the confusion of users around these concepts. [4,5] 

* [apis] Aljoscha started a discussion to deprecate and later remove UnionList OperatorState. Some current users of UnionList OperatorState have voiced concerns. No conclusion so far. [6]

* [connectors] Guowei has published FLIP-143 "Unified Sink API". This is another follow up FLIP in order for the DataStream to supersede the DataSet API (FLIP-131). The basic idea is to provide an interface that allows the development of sinks that provide exactly-once guarantees for both bounded and unbounded workloads, but don't require the developer of the sink to make this distinction. [6,7]

[1] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/RESULT-VOTE-Release-1-11-2-release-candidate-1-tp44731.html

[2] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/ANNOUNCE-Feature-freeze-for-Stateful-Functions-2-2-0-tp44606.html

[3] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-Drop-Scala-2-11-tp44607.html

[4] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-FLIP-142-Disentangle-StateBackends-from-Checkpointing-tp44496.html

[5] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/VOTE-FLIP-142-Disentangle-StateBackends-from-Checkpointing-tp44679.html

[6] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-Deprecate-and-remove-UnionList-OperatorState-tp44548p44650.html

[7] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/DISCUSS-FLIP-143-Unified-Sink-API-tp44602.html

flink-packages.org

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* Jark has published an implementation of the Nexmark benchmark for Apache Flink. [8]

[8] https://flink-packages.org/packages/nexmark-benchmark

Notable Bugs
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Nothing came to my attention.

Events, Blog Posts, Misc
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* Arvid Heise & Niels Basjes are Apache Flink Committers now! Congratulations to both. [9,10]

* The third video of my colleague Alexander's "Introduction to Flink" series has been published. This time about building event-driven applications with Apache Flink. [11]

* On the Ververica Blog, Jark and Qingshen give an outlook to their upcoming talk at Flink Forward Global [12] on Change Data Capture with Flink SQL. [13]

[9] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/ANNOUNCE-New-Apache-Flink-Committer-Arvid-Heise-tp44713.html

[10] http://apache-flink-mailing-list-archive.1008284.n3.nabble.com/ANNOUNCE-New-Apache-Flink-Committer-Niels-Basjes-tp44653.html

[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t663p-qHijE&feature=youtu.be

[12] https://www.flink-forward.org/global-2020

[13] https://www.ververica.com/blog/a-deep-dive-on-change-data-capture-with-flink-sql-during-flink-forward

Cheers, 

Konstantin

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