Query Settings

Timeplus supports some advanced SETTINGS to fine tune the streaming query processing behaviors, listed below:

query_mode

query_mode=<table|streaming>. By default, if it's omitted, it's streaming. A general setting which decides if the overall query is streaming data processing or historical data processing. This can be overwritten in the port. If you use 3128, default is streaming. If you use 8123, default is historical.

seek_to

seek_to=<timestamp|earliest|latest>. By default, if it's omitted, it's latest. A setting which tells Timeplus to seek old data in the streaming storage by timestamp. It can be a relative timestamp or an absolute timestamp. By default, it is latest, which tells Timeplus to not seek old data. Example:seek_to='2022-01-12 06:00:00.000', seek_to='-2h', or seek_to='earliest'

info

Please note, as of Jan 2023, we no longer recommend you use SETTINGS seek_to=..(except for External Stream). Please use WHERE _tp_time>='2023-01-01' or similar. _tp_time is the special timestamp column in each raw stream to represent the event time. You can use >, <, BETWEEN .. AND operations to filter the data in Timeplus storage. The only exception is External Stream. If you need to scan all existing data in the Kafka topic, you need to run the SQL with seek_to, e.g. select raw from my_ext_stream settings seek_to='earliest'

enable_backfill_from_historical_store

enable_backfill_from_historical_store=0|1. By default, if it's omitted, it's 1.

• When it's 0, the query engine either loads data from streaming storage, or from historical storage.
• When it's 1, the query engine evaluates whether it's necessary to load data from historical storage(such as the time range is outside of the streaming storage), or it'll be more efficient to get data from historical storage(for example, count/min/max is pre-computed in historical storage, faster than scanning data in streaming storage).

force_backfill_in_order

force_backfill_in_order=0|1. By default, if it's omitted, it's 0.

1. When it's 0, the data from the historical storage are turned without extra sorting. This would improve the performance.
2. When it's 1, the data from the historical storage are turned with extra sorting. This would decrease the performance. So turn on this flag carefully.

emit_during_backfill

emit_during_backfill=0|1. By default, if it's omitted, it's 0.

1. When it's 0, the query engine won't emit intermediate aggregation results during the historical data backfill.
2. When it's 1, the query engine will emit intermediate aggregation results during the historical data backfill. This will ignore the force_backfill_in_order setting. As long as there are aggregation functions and time window functions(e.g. tumble/hop/session) in the streaming SQL, when the emit_during_backfill is on, force_backfill_in_order will be applied to 1 automatically.

recovery_policy

recovery_policy=<strict|best_effort>. By default, if it's omitted, it's strict. The main use case for materialized views, if new events fail to process, such as converting a string to a int32, the default behavior will make the materialized view unusable. You may monitor the Timeplus logs to act on the dirty data. However, if you set SETTINGS recovery_policy=best_effort, then Timeplus will attempt to recover from checkpoint and try up to 3 times, then skip dirty data and continue processing the rest of the data.

replay_speed

replay_speed=N When replay_speed set to 1, it will use the replay_time_column (_tp_append_time as the default) to replay the historical data. When replay_speed is not set or set to 0, historical data will be replayed as fast as possible. When replay_speed set to 0 to 1, it will replay slower. If it's greater than 1, it will replay faster.

e.g.

select * from test_stream where _tp_time > earliest_timestamp()
settings replay_speed=1, replay_time_column='time_col'

replay_time_column

replay_time_column=columnName Specify the replay time column, default column is _tp_append_time.