Hey Community! Exciting news has arrived from the Apache SeaTunnel open-source community. Zeng Yi, a Big Data Engineer at China Telecom Cloud Technology, has been invited to join the ranks of Apache SeaTunnel Committers, bringing new energy and momentum to the project.
Within the Apache SeaTunnel community, Zeng Yi has already distinguished himself through outstanding technical expertise and strong engineering capabilities. His election as an Apache SeaTunnel Committer is a well-deserved recognition of his dedication to open source. He has actively contributed to a wide range of community initiatives, delivering high-quality code in areas such as Connector enhancements and engine adaptation. Beyond code contributions, he has also leveraged his extensive experience to improve documentation, participate in technical discussions, and help fellow developers solve problems, continuously driving the project's growth through practical action.
From his early days exploring the open-source world to becoming a key contributor to a top-tier Apache project, Zeng Yi's journey is filled with valuable experiences and unique insights. How did he find his direction in open source? What lessons can he share with aspiring contributors?
Let's dive into this in-depth community interview and hear his story firsthand!
Personal Profile
Interview Transcript
1. How long have you been involved in open source, and what attracts you to it?
If we take my first official PR submission to an Apache project as the starting point, I have been contributing to open source for about one year.
What attracts me most is the opportunity to collaborate with many outstanding developers in the community. During every PR review, reviewers provide feedback on naming conventions, edge cases, compatibility, test coverage, and many other aspects. These are valuable experiences that are not always available in such a concentrated form in day-to-day work.
Open source also allows individual contributions to create broader value. Fixing a problem within a company may only benefit a team or a specific project. However, when the same fix is merged into the community's main branch, it can benefit a much larger user base. That sense of impact is highly rewarding.
2. When did you start contributing to SeaTunnel, and what motivated you to get involved?
I started contributing to SeaTunnel in April 2025.
On April 23, I submitted my first PR (#9213), and on May 16, my first contribution was merged through PR #9305, officially making me a Contributor.
The motivation came directly from real-world challenges at work. At the time, we were building a data integration platform based on Apache SeaTunnel and Flink CDC, using Flink as the unified execution engine.
While supporting customer synchronization workloads, we encountered issues such as Oracle BLOB fields losing their original format after being read, and Doris Sink lacking flexible table name case handling. After implementing fixes internally, I realized these problems were quite common, so I organized the solutions into PRs and contributed them back to the community.
3. As a newly invited SeaTunnel Committer, could you summarize your contributions to the community, both technical and non-technical?
Since joining the Apache SeaTunnel community, I have continuously contributed in areas including Connector enhancements, engine adaptation, synchronization stability, documentation improvements, and community collaboration.
To date, I have had 60 PRs merged into the apache/seatunnel repository, covering modules such as connectors-v2, Zeta, Flink, CDC, Transform-v2, E2E, and Docs.
Code Contributions
- File Connector Enhancements
I systematically improved large-file processing and continuous file discovery capabilities for HDFS.
To address the limitation of "one file equals one split," which restricted parallelism for large files, I implemented large-file split reading support for the HDFS File Source and introduced configurations such as enable_file_split and file_split_size.
For text, CSV, and JSON files, split processing respects line boundaries to prevent record corruption. For Parquet files, logical splitting is implemented based on RowGroups.
- Continuous File Discovery
I added continuous discovery capabilities for FTP, SFTP, Local, and HDFS file sources.
This allows running jobs to continuously detect newly created or updated files, with support for the scan_interval configuration, making it suitable for periodic file drops and near real-time file synchronization scenarios.
- Connector Enhancements and Bug Fixes
I contributed enhancements and fixes across Hive, JDBC, CDC, Iceberg, Doris, Kafka, and other connectors.
Examples include:
- Hive Sink support for SchemaSaveMode and DataSaveMode
- Automatic table creation
- Schema management
- Partition field support
- Multiple storage format support
- JDBC regex-based multi-table reading
- PostgreSQL TIMESTAMP_TZ support
- Iceberg time type fixes
- Doris case sensitivity compatibility improvements
Kafka checkpoint offset recovery fixes
Flink Version Adaptation
I participated in SeaTunnel's support for Flink 1.20.1.
This involved introducing a dedicated translation layer for Flink 1.20, replacing fragile reflection-based implementations with Flink's official Sink2 API, and adding starters, build configurations, and E2E testing infrastructure.
- Stability and Engineering Quality Improvements
I continuously worked on fixing unstable CI test cases, improving E2E test coverage, and addressing issues related to checkpoint recovery, transaction commits, duplicate XA XIDs, empty directory reading, CDC snapshot splits, Kafka offset restoration, and Zeta REST APIs.
Non-Code Contributions
- Continuously improving SeaTunnel user and developer documentation, including connector documentation, parameter descriptions, usage examples, E2E configuration guides, onboarding materials, and architecture documents.
- Actively participating in PR reviews and technical discussions.
- Adjusting implementation approaches, adding tests, and improving documentation based on reviewer feedback, helping drive PRs from design to merge.
4. After contributing to SeaTunnel for some time, what do you see as its advantages and shortcomings compared to other solutions? What keeps you engaged in the community?
One of my strongest impressions is that SeaTunnel is highly aligned with real enterprise data integration needs.
Rather than focusing on a single data source, execution engine, or synchronization method, SeaTunnel aims to solve a broad range of heterogeneous data integration challenges.
Compared with competing solutions, one of SeaTunnel's most significant advantages is its rich Connector ecosystem.
It provides comprehensive coverage for commonly used systems such as JDBC, CDC, Hive, Doris, Kafka, Iceberg, HDFS, FTP/SFTP, and local file systems.
In enterprise environments, data integration rarely involves a single pipeline. Instead, organizations often require database-to-warehouse, database-to-lakehouse, file-to-Hive/Doris, CDC-to-Kafka, and many other combinations. SeaTunnel offers a relatively unified development and configuration experience across these scenarios.
Another major advantage is multi-engine support.
Different organizations have different technology stacks. Some workloads are better suited for Flink, while others may choose SeaTunnel Zeta. SeaTunnel does not lock users into a specific execution engine, which is highly valuable for enterprise adoption.
As for areas for improvement, I believe CDC capabilities can be further strengthened.
By learning from projects such as Flink CDC, SeaTunnel could continue improving schema change support across multiple data sources, consistency guarantees for different sinks, and recovery stability after failures.
Documentation and best practices can also be improved, especially around production deployment, troubleshooting, and performance tuning.
In addition, emerging areas such as AI data integration, unstructured data processing, and vector databases present exciting opportunities for future exploration.
What keeps me engaged is the community's high level of activity.
Issues, PRs, and discussions typically receive timely feedback, which makes contributions feel meaningful rather than isolated efforts.
I can clearly see the value of my contributions. Many problems originate from real business scenarios, and once resolved and contributed back, other users can immediately benefit.
Another important factor is the quality of community reviews.
Reviewers do not simply check whether code runs. They evaluate solution generality, edge cases, test completeness, documentation quality, and long-term maintainability.
Although this often requires multiple iterations, it significantly improves both the solution and my own engineering skills.
5. Have you developed custom solutions to address SeaTunnel's limitations? Have these been contributed back to the community?
Yes.
In fact, my initial involvement with SeaTunnel began because I encountered issues while using it.
At the time, we were building a data integration platform based on SeaTunnel and Flink CDC. During production synchronization tasks, we discovered problems related to Oracle BLOB field handling and Doris Sink table name case sensitivity.
While these might seem like minor details, they can directly affect synchronization results in production environments.
I first validated solutions internally and then submitted them to the community as PRs.
Later, much of my work focused on File Connectors.
For example, HDFS originally mapped one file to one split, which limited parallelism when processing very large files.
I introduced large-file split reading support with configurable split behavior and split sizes.
This required more than simply splitting files by byte offsets. Text, CSV, and JSON files must preserve record boundaries, while Parquet files are more naturally divided by RowGroups.
I also implemented continuous discovery for FTP, SFTP, Local, and HDFS file sources.
Many file synchronization scenarios involve periodic file arrivals rather than a fixed set of files prepared upfront, making continuous discovery essential.
Additionally, I participated in Flink 1.20.1 compatibility work because our product needed to standardize on a newer Flink version.
This included translation layers, starters, build configurations, and E2E testing to ensure SeaTunnel worked properly on Flink 1.20.1.
Most of these enhancements have already been contributed back to the community.
My philosophy is simple:
If a problem is fixed only internally, the team must maintain that patch indefinitely.
If the problem is common, contributing it back to the community creates greater value and allows the solution to benefit from community review and validation.
6. Does your company use SeaTunnel in production? What are the use cases? If not, would you recommend it, and why?
Yes, our company uses SeaTunnel in real production environments.
For customer-facing data integration scenarios, we have built a data integration platform based on open-source Apache SeaTunnel and Flink CDC, with Flink serving as the unified underlying execution engine.
Currently, we support a wide range of data sources, including various databases, data warehouses, data lakes, Kafka, HTTP, and many others.
Typical target systems include Hive, Doris, and Iceberg, which are used to support customer requirements such as data lake ingestion, data warehouse loading, and both real-time and batch synchronization.
From practical experience, SeaTunnel is well suited to serve as the foundation of a data integration platform.
On one hand, its broad Connector coverage allows it to adapt to different customer environments and heterogeneous data sources.
On the other hand, its configuration model and extensibility are relatively clear and straightforward, making it suitable for productization and enterprise-level packaging.
Of course, when delivering solutions to customers, we still perform additional adaptation and validation based on specific business scenarios, including complex data type compatibility, task stability, failure recovery, performance characteristics, and write capabilities for different target systems.
Overall, SeaTunnel provides significant value in heterogeneous data synchronization and lakehouse integration scenarios.
7. What kind of support do you hope the SeaTunnel community can provide for your personal growth?
I hope that through participating in the SeaTunnel community, I can continue improving my engineering capabilities, open-source collaboration skills, and technical perspective.
SeaTunnel involves many production-grade challenges, including data source integration, type conversion, task partitioning, fault tolerance and recovery, checkpointing, and multi-engine compatibility. Working on these areas greatly helps deepen my understanding of large-scale data systems.
At the same time, open-source collaboration has encouraged me to think beyond solving immediate business problems and to consider factors such as generality, compatibility, documentation quality, and test completeness.
Going forward, I would like to participate more actively in code reviews and community discussions, helping other Contributors improve their solutions and implementations.
In addition, if the community continues exploring areas such as AI, Agents, unstructured data, and vector databases, I would be very interested in participating and gaining hands-on experience in these emerging domains.
8. What is your understanding of the Committer role? What responsibilities should a Committer have within the community?
In my view, being a Committer is not simply about having merge permissions.
More importantly, a Committer is responsible for maintaining project quality and supporting the long-term growth of the community.
First, Committers should continue contributing.
Obtaining Committer status should not be the end of one's involvement. Instead, Committers should continue identifying problems, solving issues, and improving the areas where they have expertise.
Second, Committers should take code reviews seriously.
A good review is not merely about checking formatting or verifying that the code compiles successfully.
More importantly, reviewers should evaluate whether a solution is well designed, sufficiently general, capable of handling edge cases, compatible with existing functionality, and supported by adequate testing and documentation.
In many cases, a pull request becomes significantly clearer and more reliable after going through the review process.
Third, Committers should help new Contributors integrate into the community.
Many first-time contributors may not be familiar with project architecture, contribution guidelines, testing requirements, or communication processes.
Receiving timely and friendly feedback can greatly increase their confidence and encourage them to continue contributing.
For a community to grow sustainably, it cannot rely solely on a small number of contributors. It must continuously attract and nurture new participants.
Finally, Committers should also participate in strategic planning and project direction.
For example, determining which Connectors need priority improvements, which stability issues should be addressed first, and which documentation or testing gaps need attention all require collaboration between community members and real-world users.
9. How do you feel about becoming an Apache Software Foundation Committer? Do you have any message for the community or suggestions for the project's future development?
I am truly grateful to the community for recognizing my previous contributions and inviting me to become a SeaTunnel Committer.
For me, this is both an encouragement and a responsibility.
I originally became involved with SeaTunnel because of practical problems encountered in my daily work.
As I became more engaged, I realized that many business challenges are not isolated cases. When solutions are contributed back to the community, they can help many other users facing similar issues. That is one of the reasons I find open source so meaningful.
Throughout this journey, I am also deeply thankful to all the Reviewers and Contributors who have helped me along the way.
Many of my PRs went through multiple rounds of discussion and revision. While the process could sometimes be repetitive, the final solutions were always more complete and robust, and I learned a tremendous amount from those experiences.
Looking ahead, I hope SeaTunnel will continue strengthening the production-grade capabilities of its core Connectors, including CDC, JDBC, File, Hive, Doris, and Iceberg.
At the same time, I believe the project should continue investing in stability, observability, documentation, and best practices.
In addition, I plan to continue contributing to AI-related initiatives and practical implementations, including unstructured data processing, vector databases, LLM data pipelines, and Agent automation scenarios.
I hope to further explore how SeaTunnel's data integration capabilities can support these emerging technologies.
10. What are your plans for helping drive the project forward in the near future?
Over the coming period, I plan to continue contributing to Connector development and production stability improvements.
This includes enhancing commonly used Connectors, fixing issues, and improving E2E test coverage.
At the same time, I will place particular focus on AI-powered data integration.
Recently, the community has been discussing Knowledge Sync and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities.
The goal is to enable SeaTunnel to take on responsibilities related to enterprise knowledge synchronization and indexing, including:
- Document discovery
- Document parsing
- Content chunking and segmentation
- Embedding generation
- Writing data into vector databases such as Milvus and Qdrant
- Lifecycle management for document updates, deletions, and unchanged-content detection
Personally, I hope to participate in both the design and implementation of these capabilities.
By combining SeaTunnel's existing data integration strengths with AI and RAG scenarios, I believe we can unlock new possibilities for enterprise knowledge bases, unstructured data synchronization, and vector search data preparation workflows.
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