Streaming SQL to unify batch and stream processing: Theory and practice with Apache Flink at Uber

Fabian Hueske and Shuyi Chen explore SQL's role in the world of streaming data and its implementation in Apache Flink and cover fundamental concepts, such as streaming semantics, event time, and incremental results. They also share their experience using Flink SQL in production at Uber, explaining how Uber leverages Flink SQL to solve its unique business challenges.

SQL is the lingua franca for querying and processing data. To this day, it provides nonprogrammers with a powerful tool for analyzing and manipulating data. But with the emergence of stream processing as a core technology for data infrastructures, can you still use SQL and bring real-time data analysis to a broader audience? The answer is yes, you can. SQL fits into the streaming world very well and forms an intuitive and powerful abstraction for streaming analytics. More importantly, you can use SQL as an abstraction to unify batch and streaming data processing. Viewing streams as dynamic tables, you can obtain consistent results from SQL evaluated over static tables and streams alike and use SQL to build materialized views as a data integration tool. Fabian Hueske and Shuyi Chen explore SQL’s role in the world of streaming data and its implementation in Apache Flink and cover fundamental concepts, such as streaming semantics, event time, and incremental results. They also share their experience using Flink SQL in production at Uber, explaining how Uber leverages Flink SQL to solve its unique business challenges and how the unified stream and batch processing platform enables both technical or nontechnical users to process real-time and batch data reliably using the same SQL at Uber scale.