Ingestion Time

Ingestion Time is the timestamp assigned to an event when it is first received or ingested by a specific system or component, such as RisingWave itself or an upstream broker like Kafka. While easier to manage than Event Time, processing based purely on Ingestion Time can lead to inaccurate results if events experience variable delays before ingestion, especially for time-windowed operations. It's distinct from Event Time (when the event occurred) and Processing Time (when computation happens).