Inquiry about FLINK-36991 - NPE in BinarySegmentUtils status and potential workaround

[zhanpeng <zh...@foxmail.com>]

Dear Flink Community,

I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to inquire about the status of issue FLINK-36991 titled "NPE in BinarySegmentUtils" that was reported on January 2, 2025, by Adam Domański.

The issue describes a recurring NullPointerException occurring in the BinarySegmentUtils class at line 411, specifically in the inFirstSegment method. This is causing job failures approximately three times per day in production environments running both Flink 1.19.1 and 1.20.0:

Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
	at org.apache.flink.table.data.binary.BinarySegmentUtils.inFirstSegment(BinarySegmentUtils.java:411) ~[flink-table-api-java-uber-1.19.1.jar:1.19.1]
	at org.apache.flink.table.data.binary.BinarySegmentUtils.copyToBytes(BinarySegmentUtils.java:132) ~[flink-table-api-java-uber-1.19.1.jar:1.19.1]
	...

I noticed that the issue remains unresolved and unassigned more than a month after being reported. I'm experiencing similar problems in my own deployment(Flink 1.18) and have a few questions:

1. Is there any ongoing work on this issue that I might not be seeing?
2. Are there any known workarounds that could help mitigate this problem until a proper fix is available?
3. Has anyone else in the community encountered this specific NPE, and if so, how did they address it?

Since I'm unable to contact the original reporter directly, I thought reaching out to the community mailing list would be the best approach. Any insights or guidance regarding this issue would be greatly appreciated as it's affecting the stability of our production jobs.

Thank you for your time and contributions to the Flink ecosystem.

Best regards,
Rise