Watermarks in Stream Processing Systems: Semantics and Comparative Analysis of Apache Flink and Google Cloud Dataflow

Summary: Defines watermarks as a principled tool for temporal completeness in unbounded streams, enabling correct results, dip detection, and timely garbage collection. Equivalent watermark implementations in Apache Flink vs Google Cloud Dataflow, with implications for correctness and latency. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12518
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 4.9322174e-05
Overall Rank: 6,767 | 52.93%
DOI: 10.14778/3476311.3476389

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,318	Disaggregated State Management in Apache Flink® 2.0	2025	VLDB	4.3556432e-05
10,043	Accelerating Stream Processing Engines via Hardware Offloading	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,417	Streaming Democratized: Ease Across the Latency Spectrum with Delayed View Semantics and Snowflake Dynamic Tables	2025	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,546	Evaluating Continuous Queries with Inconsistency Annotations	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
10,941	PECJ: Stream Window Join on Disorder Data Streams with Proactive Error Compensation	2024	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,962	Fault Tolerance Placement in the Internet of Things	2024	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
259	High-Performance Complex Event Processing over Streams	2006	SIGMOD	0.00030174924
314	MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant Stream Processing at Internet Scale	2013	VLDB	0.00028084774
432	Flexible Time Management in Data Stream Systems	2004	PODS	0.00023368424
522	Differential dataflow	2013	CIDR	0.00021099241
538	The Dataflow Model: A Practical Approach to Balancing Correctness, Latency, and Cost in Massive-Scale, Unbounded, Out-of-Order Data Processing	2015	VLDB	0.00020678804
1,098	Trill: A High-Performance Incremental Query Processor for Diverse Analytics	2015	VLDB	0.00014114442
2,340	SASE: Complex Event Processing over Streams	2007	CIDR	9.004232e-05
4,822	Consistency and Completeness: Rethinking Distributed Stream Processing in Apache Kafka	2021	SIGMOD	5.8959131e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,547	Optimistic Recovery for Iterative Dataflows in Action	2015	SIGMOD	4.3259935e-05
12,331	Tagging Stream Data for Rich Real-Time Services	2009	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
538	The Dataflow Model: A Practical Approach to Balancing Correctness, Latency, and Cost in Massive-Scale, Unbounded, Out-of-Order Data Processing	2015	VLDB	0.00020678804
4,822	Consistency and Completeness: Rethinking Distributed Stream Processing in Apache Kafka	2021	SIGMOD	5.8959131e-05
1,548	Structured Streaming: A Declarative API for Real-Time Applications in Apache Spark	2018	SIGMOD	0.00011431383
10,862	How Reliable Are Streams? End-to-End Processing-Guarantee Validation and Performance Benchmarking of Stream Processing Systems	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,804	State Management in Apache Flink	2017	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
5,130	One SQL to Rule Them All – an Efficient and Syntactically Idiomatic Approach to Management of Streams and Tables	2019	SIGMOD	5.6755067e-05
11,468	Klink: Progress-Aware Scheduling for Streaming Data Systems	2021	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
7,938	Correctness in Stream Processing: Challenges and Opportunities	2022	CIDR	4.613363e-05