Is it mandatory to checkpoint my streaming query.

[brickster_2018]

I have ad-hoc one-time streaming queries where I believe checkpoint won't give any value add. Should I still use checkpointing

[brickster_2018 · Accepted solution]

It's not mandatory. But the strong recommendation is to use Checkpointing for Streaming irrespective of your use case. This is because the default checkpoint location can get a lot of files over time as there is no graceful guaranteed cleaning in place if you do not specify a streaming checkpoint location. Having these stale checkpoint files can impact the performance of queries as file listing on these directories turn out to be very expensive.