I'm running a pipeline, source from Kafka topic and sink to an IMap. Everytime I write one, I come across the methods withIngestionTimestamps() and withoutTimestamps() and wondering how are they useful? I understand its all about the source adding time to the event. Question is how do I get to use it? I don't see any method to fetch the timestamp from the event?
My IMap have a possibility of getting filled with duplicate values. If I could make use of the withIngestionTimestamps() method to evaluate latest record and discard the old?
Jet uses the event timestamps to correctly apply windowing. It must decide which event belongs to which window and when the time has come to close a window and emit its aggregated result. The timestamps are present on the events as metadata and aren't exposed to the user.
However, if you want to apply your logic that refers to the wall-clock time, you can always call System.currentTimeMillis() to check it against the timestamp explicitly stored in the IMap value. That would be equivalent to using the processing time, which is quite similar to the ingestion time that Jet applies. Ingestion time is simply the processing time valid at the source vertex of the pipeline, so applying processing time at the sink vertex is just slightly different from that, and has the same practical properties.