Seth Wiesman and Fabian Hueske show off Apache Flink’s State Processor API:
The State Processor API that comes with Flink 1.9 is a true game-changer in how you can work with application state! In a nutshell, it extends the DataSet API with Input and OutputFormats to read and write savepoint or checkpoint data. Due to the interoperability of DataSet and Table API, you can even use relational Table API or SQL queries to analyze and process state data.
For example, you can take a savepoint of a running stream processing application and analyze it with a DataSet batch program to verify that the application behaves correctly. Or you can read a batch of data from any store, preprocess it, and write the result to a savepoint that you use to bootstrap the state of a streaming application. It’s also possible to fix inconsistent state entries now. Finally, the State Processor API opens up many ways to evolve a stateful application that were previously blocked by parameter and design choices that could not be changed without losing all the state of the application after it was started. For example, you can now arbitrarily modify the data types of states, adjust the maximum parallelism of operators, split or merge operator state, re-assign operator UIDs, and so on
Read on to learn more about how this works.