TimelyDataflow / TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow
Implement a GroupTotal trait and operators
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- Dominant language
- Rust
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- Avg merge
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- Merged PRs (30d)
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Description
Issue #74 calls for specialized implementations for totally ordered timestamps. The group and group_u operators are currently very complex, in part due to the complexity of partially ordered times. This is a non-trivial implementation (much more complex than CountTotal or DistinctTotal), but there are at least a few important simplifications we can exploit:
-
The times at which the
groupvariants must be re-evaluated are exactly those found in the input differences. This is unlike for partially ordered times, which have a more complicated logic to determine further synthetic times that may produce output differences. -
The running accumulations for each key need not (i) track the meet of subsequent times (it would be just the
min, equal to the next time in sorted order), nor (ii) maintain an intermediate collection of updates that have been advanced up to this meet (it can instead maintain a simpler running accumulation of the collection in question).
There are still a large number of subtleties, and the current group.rs file may not be the best starting point due to its complexity (both intrinsic complexity, and questionable structure). I recommend if anyone wants to try and work on this issue we should get in touch and map out the right way to spec out how it should work.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with group.rs and trace the existing group and group_u operators, then compare the simpler CountTotal and DistinctTotal implementations. Work out the specification for GroupTotal with totally ordered timestamps, including reevaluation at input-difference times and running accumulations. Done means the specialized trait and operators are implemented after their subtleties and structure have been mapped out.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- rust
- Domain
- stream-processing
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100