Imagine you are running a shoe shop. You want to get an overview of shoe sales, understand your customers better, and you'd like to start a loyalty program, too. Luckily, you already use Confluent Cloud as a backbone for your data. This means you can leverage Confluent Flink SQL for some ad-hoc analyses, and determine which of your customers are currently eligible for a free pair of shoes!

For a good preparation and first understanding, please read this Guide to Flink SQL: An In-Depth Exploration . If you want a refresher of the Kafka basics, we highly recommend our Kafka Fundamentals Workshop .

In this workshop, we will build a Shoe Store Loyalty Engine. We will use Flink SQL in Confluent Cloud on AWS or Azure (GCP coming soon). YOu can find an architecture diagram below.

The hands-on consists of two labs (see below), and these require Confluent Cloud infrastructure that has to be provisioned before we can start with the actual workshop.

• Preparation of required Confluent Cloud Resources: You can either create your infrastructure manually with this guide or you can use Terraform for an automatated creation: Terraform guide.

• The complete finished Hands-on can be created automatically with terraform as well. Please use this guide

• Lab1: Flink Tables, Select Statements, Aggregations, Time Windows
• Lab2: Join Statements, Data Enrichment, Statement Sets

Together, the Labs will design a loyality program within Flink SQL. You can see the complete Mapping of dynamic Tables and Topics in the next graphic.

Optional: You can deploy the complete finished workshop with Terraform. Please follow this guide for a complete and finished Loyalty-Program. Only the notification need to be setup manually.

You can find the Python Notification client in this guide.

The lab execution do not consume much money. We calculated an amount of less than 10$ for a couple of hours of testing. If you create the cluster one day before, we recommend to pause all connectors.