Prompt: What is a trigger in Apache Beam?

Response: Apache Beam uses triggers to determine when to emit the aggregated results of each window, referred to as a pane.

Triggers provide two additional capabilities compared to outputting at the end of a window:

• Allowing early results to be output before the end of the window.
• Allowing late data to be handled after the end of the window.

This feature lets you control the flow of your data and balance between completeness, latency, and cost.

You set the triggers for a PCollection by setting the trigger parameter of the WindowInto transform.

pcollection | WindowInto(
    FixedWindows(1 * 60),
    trigger=AfterProcessingTime(1 * 60),
    accumulation_mode=AccumulationMode.DISCARDING,
)

When a trigger fires, it emits the current contents of the window as a pane. Because a trigger can fire multiple times, the accumulation mode determines whether the system accumulates the window panes as the trigger fires, or discards them. This behavior is controlled by the window accumulation mode parameter of the WindowInto transform.

Beam provides several built-in triggers that you can use to determine when to emit the results of your pipeline's windowed computations:

• Event time triggers
• Processing time triggers
• Data-driven triggers
• Composite triggers

One of the most useful trigger patterns is the AfterWatermark trigger, which fires a single time when Apache Beam estimates that all the data has arrived, such as when the watermark passes the end of the window.