Status

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Status

Current state: [One of "Under Discussion", "Accepted", "Rejected"]

Discussion thread: here (<- link to https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/flink-dev/)

JIRA: here (<- link to https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-XXXX)

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Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

Any data that accessible through an external system is encoded in some kind of format (Avro, JSON, CSV, ...). Flink provides interfaces that parse and produce the well-formed serializations of data according to the chosen format. However, the current state of Flink is that there is a wide-range of interfaces and factories that are not connected. Any user that wants to read from CSV and includes the dependency will find >10 public Flink classes that start with CSV. Each of these implementations have a very specific purpose that may not be as obvious to users as it's for the developers. The implementations also offer different ways of configuration.

This FLIP aims to provide a first-class citizen Format interface tDescribe the problems you are trying to solve.

Public Interfaces

Briefly list any new interfaces that will be introduced as part of this proposal or any existing interfaces that will be removed or changed. The purpose of this section is to concisely call out the public contract that will come along with this feature.

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