Flink: Programmatic Capabilities for Developers and dbt/SQL-Native for Data Practitioners

This post announces the General Availability of the Flink Table API in Java and Process Table Functions (PTFs) in Java for developers, enabling code-first development of sophisticated Flink applications with serverless operational simplicity. It also expands User-Defined Function (UDF) support to Python on AWS and Java on GCP. For analytics engineers, it highlights the General Availability of the dbt adapter and Materialized Tables for managing Flink pipelines via dbt, and introduces Snapshot Queries for unified batch and streaming analysis. For AI, it details Flink AI Model Inference for calling remote model endpoints and the introduction of Streaming Agents for event-driven agents on Flink. The post emphasizes the co-design of Kafka and Flink, sharing unified governance, security, and the Kora storage engine. It also introduces Flink Advantage Packs for predictable pricing.