AI / Apache Paimon Interview questions
How do you apply schema evolution during CDC ingestion into Paimon?
Paimon's CDC ingestion tooling can keep a target table's schema in sync with a changing source automatically, but only through the right ingestion path. Plain Flink SQL CDC ingestion does not propagate source schema changes to Paimon.
Using the dedicated sync actions instead — such as MySqlSyncTableAction for MySQL, or the equivalent Kafka/MongoDB/Postgres/Pulsar sync jobs — does propagate schema changes, including newly added columns and their data, without requiring the sync job to be restarted.
Supported changes are limited: Paimon can add columns and widen column types (e.g., a shorter string to a longer one, or a smaller integer to a wider one), but it cannot rename a table or drop a column through CDC sync — a RENAME COLUMN is instead applied as adding a new column.
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