Fixed

Overview

Fixed windows (sometimes called tumbling windows) are defined by a static window size, e.g. 30 second windows, one minute windows, etc. They are generally aligned, i.e. every window applies across all the data for the corresponding period of time. It has a fixed size measured in time and does not overlap. The element which belongs to one window will not belong to any other tumbling window. For example, a window size of 20 seconds will include all entities of the stream which came in a certain 20-second interval.

To enable Fixed window, we use fixed under window section.

vertices:
  - name: my-udf
    udf:
      groupBy:
        window:
          fixed:
            length: duration

NOTE: A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".

Length

The length is the window size of the fixed window.

Example

A 60-second window size can be defined as following.

vertices:
  - name: my-udf
    udf:
      groupBy:
        window:
          fixed:
            length: 60s

The yaml snippet above contains an example spec of a reduce vertex that uses fixed window aggregation. As we can see, the length of the window is 60s. This means only one window will be active at any point in time. It is also possible to have multiple inactive and non-empty windows (based on out-of-order arrival of elements).

The window boundaries for the first window (post bootstrap) are determined by rounding down from time.now() to the nearest multiple of length of the window. So considering the above example, if the time.now() corresponds to 2031-09-29T18:46:30Z, then the start-time of the window will be adjusted to 2031-09-29T18:46:00Z and the end-time is set accordingly to 2031-09-29T18:47:00Z. Windows are left inclusive and right exclusive which means an element with event time (considering event time characteristic) of 2031-09-29T18:47:00Z will belong to the window with boundaries [2031-09-29T18:47:00Z, 2031-09-29T18:48:00Z)

It is important to note that because of this property, for a constant throughput, the first window may contain fewer elements than other windows.

Check the links below to see the UDF examples for different languages.

• Python
• Golang
• Java

Streaming Mode

Reduce can be enabled on streaming mode to stream messages or forward partial responses to the next vertex. This is useful for custom triggering, where we want to forward responses to the next vertex quickly, even before the fixed window closes. The close-of-book and a final triggering will still happen even if partial results have been emitted.

To enable reduce streaming, set the streaming flag to true in the fixed window configuration.

vertices:
  - name: my-udf
    udf:
      groupBy:
        window:
          fixed:
            length: duration
            streaming: true # set streaming to true to enable reduce streamer

Note: UDFs should use the ReduceStreamer functionality in the SDKs to use this feature.

Check the links below to see the UDF examples in streaming mode for different languages.

• Python
• Golang
• Java