Processing time trigger, to be or not to be?

That's the question. The lack of the processing time trigger means more a reactive micro-batch triggering but it cannot be considered as the single true best practice. Let's see why.

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Apache Flink and the input data reading

I'm writing this unexpected blog post because I got stuck with watermarks and checkpoints and felt that I was missing some basics. Even though this introduction is a bit negative, the exploration for the data reading enabled my other discoveries.

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Anatomy of a Structured Streaming job

Apache Spark Structured Streaming relies on the micro-batch pattern which evaluates the same query in each execution. That's only a high level vision, though. Under-the-hood, there are many other interesting things that happen.

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Min rate limits for Apache Kafka

I bet you know it already. You can limit the max throughput for Apache Spark Structured Streaming jobs for popular data sources such as Apache Kafka, Delta Lake, or raw files. Have you known that you can also control the lower limit, at least for Apache Kafka?

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What's new on the cloud for data engineers - part 12 (10.2023-02.2024)

It's time for another part of "What's new on the cloud for data engineers". Let's see what happened in the last 5 months.

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Table file formats - streaming writer: Delta Lake

The previous blog from the series we discovered streaming reader. However, an end-to-end streaming Delta Lake pipeline also requires a writer which will be our focus today.

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Apache Flink and cluster components deep dive

Previously you could read about transformation of a user job definition into an executable stream graph. Since this explanation was relatively high-level, I decided to deep dive into the final step executing the code.

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Static enrichment dataset with Delta Lake

Data enrichment is one of common data engineering tasks. It's relatively easy to implement with static datasets because of the data availability. However, this apparently easy task can become a nightmare if used with inappropriate technologies.

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Table file formats - streaming reader: Delta Lake

Even though I'm into streaming these days, I haven't really covered streaming in Delta Lake yet. I only slightly blogged about Change Data Feed but completely missed the fundamentals. Hopefully, this and next blog posts will change this!

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Files streaming is quite a challenge

It's technically possible to process files in a continuous way from a streaming job. However, if you are expecting some latency sensitive job, this will always be slower than processing data directly from a streaming broker. Why?

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Stream processing models

If you're interested in stream processing, I bet your thinking is technology-based. It's not wrong, after all, the ability to use a tool gives you and me a job. However, for a long-term consideration it's better to reason in terms of patterns or models. Being aware of a more general vision helps assimilate new tools.

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2023 retrospective on waitingforcode.com

This is one of my favorite blog posts, the yearly retrospective. Every year I summarize what happened in the past 12 months and share with you my future plans. It's time for the 2023 Edition!

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Streamhouse, the next house to move into?

I must admit it, if you want to catch my attention, you can use some keywords. One of them is "stream". Knowing that, the topic of my new blog post shouldn't surprise you.

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Order is king for the performance

Even though nowadays data processing frameworks and data stores have smart query planners, they don't take our responsibility to correctly design the job logic.

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Data+AI Summit 2023, retrospective part 2

One week later than initially announced, but here it is, the second part for Data+AI Summit 2023 retrospective. I don't know how, but I managed to include some streaming-related talks here too!

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