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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
12706
Venue
VLDB
Year
2021
Pagerank
5.8604458e-05
Overall Rank
6,502 | 55.40%
DOI
10.14778/3476311.3476389

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{akidau_vldb21,
        title = {{Watermarks in Stream Processing Systems: Semantics and Comparative Analysis of Apache Flink and Google Cloud Dataflow}},
        author = {Akidau, Tyler and Begoli, Edmon and Chernyak, Slava and Hueske, Fabian and Knight, Kathryn and Knowles, Kenneth and Mills, Daniel and Sotolongo, Dan},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {12},
        pages = {3135--3147},
        doi = {10.14778/3476311.3476389},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3476311.3476389},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
9,050 Streaming Democratized: Ease Across the Latency Spectrum with Delayed View Semantics and Snowflake Dynamic Tables 2025 SIGMOD 5.3251649e-05
9,468 Disaggregated State Management in Apache Flink 2.0 2025 VLDB 5.2634238e-05
10,337 Accelerating Stream Processing Engines via Hardware Offloading 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,818 Evaluating Continuous Queries with Inconsistency Annotations 2025 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,159 PECJ: Stream Window Join on Disorder Data Streams with Proactive Error Compensation 2024 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
11,176 Fault Tolerance Placement in the Internet of Things 2024 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
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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
224 MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant Stream Processing at Internet Scale 2013 VLDB 0.00024130894
229 High-Performance Complex Event Processing over Streams 2006 SIGMOD 0.00023927582
361 The Dataflow Model: A Practical Approach to Balancing Correctness, Latency, and Cost in Massive-Scale, Unbounded, Out-of-Order Data Processing 2015 VLDB 0.00020138717
424 Flexible Time Management in Data Stream Systems 2004 PODS 0.0001870735
455 Differential dataflow 2013 CIDR 0.00018133241
710 Trill: A High-Performance Incremental Query Processor for Diverse Analytics 2015 VLDB 0.00014715033
2,314 SASE: Complex Event Processing over Streams 2007 CIDR 8.7619735e-05
4,389 Consistency and Completeness: Rethinking Distributed Stream Processing in Apache Kafka 2021 SIGMOD 6.7304854e-05
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3 361 The Dataflow Model: A Practical Approach to Balancing Correctness, Latency, and Cost in Massive-Scale, Unbounded, Out-of-Order Data Processing 2015 VLDB
4 4,389 Consistency and Completeness: Rethinking Distributed Stream Processing in Apache Kafka 2021 SIGMOD
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