https://www.infoq.com InfoQ Apache Flink Articles feed https://www.infoq.com/articles/schema-proliferation-problem/?utm_campaign=infoq_content&utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=feed&utm_term=Apache+Flink-articles <img src="https://res.infoq.com/articles/schema-proliferation-problem/en/headerimage/schema-proliferation-problem-header-1779270222602.jpg"/><p>Schema proliferation builds slowly and gets expensive fast. One schema per event type feels right until there are ten tables, union queries spanning all of them, and a single field rename touching every schema. Discriminator-based schema consolidation collapses that to two tables, turning multi-table unions into a single query, while new variants are additive and don't break existing consumers.</p> <i>By Spoorthi Basu</i> Java Apache Kafka Apache Iceberg Schema Apache Flink Architecture & Design Development article Mon, 25 May 2026 13:00:00 GMT https://www.infoq.com/articles/schema-proliferation-problem/?utm_campaign=infoq_content&utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=feed&utm_term=Apache+Flink-articles Spoorthi Basu 2026-05-25T13:00:00Z /articles/schema-proliferation-problem/en