Re: Persisting state in RocksDB

Posted by Paul K Moore on
URL: http://deprecated-apache-flink-user-mailing-list-archive.369.s1.nabble.com/Persisting-state-in-RocksDB-tp44305p44362.html

Hi Arvid - thanks for the welcome :)

The SinkFunction is custom (extends RichSinkFunction), and writes to a legacy web service over HTTP.

I’ll investigate the keyBy+KeyedProcessFunction further - thanks. Frankly I looked at this but I think I was confusing myself between working with KV store (database thinking) and the new (to me) world of "stream state".

Additionally, if I move my SinkFunction functionality (HTTP POST, PUT etc) into the KeyedProcess, I assume I would use a DiscardingSink to terminate the flow, or is this an anti-pattern?

Many thanks

Paul



On 9 Jun 2021, at 13:02, Arvid Heise <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Paul,

Welcome to the club!

What's your SinkFunction? Is it custom? If so, you could also implement CheckpointedFunction to read and write data.
Here you could use OperatorStateStore and with it the BroadcastState. However, broadcast state is quite heavy (it sends all data to all instances, so it doesn't scale).

A better way would be to have a keyBy+KeyedProcessFunction before the sink function. You could keyBy your key and use a normal value state [1] to store the data point. If you configure your state backend to be rocksdb [2]. Then you have everything together.

Note that you could also have it next to sink function. There is no reason to not have a dangling operator (no sink).


On Wed, Jun 9, 2021 at 12:13 AM Paul K Moore <[hidden email]> wrote:
Hi all,

First post here, so please be kind :)

Firstly some context; I have the following high-level job topology:

(1) FlinkPulsarSource -> (2) RichAsyncFunction -> (3) SinkFunction

1. The FlinkPulsarSource reads event notifications about article updates from a Pulsar topic
2. The RichAsyncFunction fetches the “full” article from the specified URL end-point, and transmutes it into a “legacy” article format
3. The SinkFunction writes the “legacy” article to a (legacy) web platform i.e. the sink is effectively another web site

I have this all up and running (despite lots of shading fun).

When the SinkFunction creates an article on the legacy platform it returns an 'HTTP 201 - Created’ with a Location header suitably populated.

Now, I need to persist that Location header and, more explicitly, need to persist a map between the URLs for the new and legacy platforms.  This is needed for latter update and delete processing.

The question is how do I store this mapping information?

I’ve spent some time trying to grok state management and the various backends, but from what I can see the state management is focused on “operator scoped” state.  This seems reasonable given the requirement for barriers etc to ensure accurate recovery.

However, I need some persistence between operators (shared state?) and with longevity beyond the processing of an operator.

My gut reaction is that I need an external K-V store such as Ignite (or similar). Frankly given that Flink ships with embedded RocksDB I was hoping to use that, but there seems no obvious way to do this, and lots of advice saying don’t :)

Am I missing something obvious here?

Many thanks in advance

Paul