# KLIP-63: PAUSE and RESUME for persistent queries 

**Author**: Jim Hughes (jnh5y) |
**Release Target**: 0.28.0; 7.3.0 |
**Status**: _Merged_ |
**Discussion**: https://github.com/confluentinc/ksql/pull/9095 

**tl;dr:** Adds the ability to pause the processing of a persistent query.
           
## Motivation and background

Users may wish to pause a query for a number of reasons and then resume processing.  As examples, users may wish to modify data pipelines built from persistent queries or to manage computational resources.

Presently to manage processing, they would have to terminate a query and recreate it.  This approach means that any state would have to be recomputed; the goal of this work is to add the capability to pause processing temporarily while allowing Kafka consumers and state stores to be retained.

## What is in scope

Pausing and resuming persistent queries and the necessary language modifications to support this are in scope.

## What is not in scope

We are not considering the ability to pause and resume transient queries.  Additionally, modifying the consumers' state is out of scope.  (This would allow for processing to skip records or reprocess data.)

## Value/Return

End users will be able to manage query processing once this feature is implemented.  For example, this will allow for better control while designing data pipelines.  Pausing an upstream query will allow users to update a downstream query or other processing and iterate through design without processing all the data in a stream.

## Public APIS

SQL Grammar changes:
Add PAUSE <queryID>, PAUSE ALL, RESUME <queryID>, RESUME ALL.

## Design

For `PAUSE <queryID>` and `RESUME <queryID>`, appropriate methods on the `KafkaStreams` client will be called to pause or 
resume (respectively) the topology associated with the query.

For `PAUSE ALL` and `RESUME ALL`, all persistent queries will be paused or resumed.

The new commands will be written to the command topic.  During server restart, the commands will be considered for compaction, and queries will be able to be created in the PAUSED state. 

## Test plan

Integration tests will show that 
- Pausing a query moves it from the RUNNING state to the PAUSED state.
- Queries in the PAUSED state do not process data.
- Paused queries can be resumed.  Once resumed, they will be in the running state and process data from where it left off.  To show that data is not processed, a simple mathematical aggregation will be used.
- Pausing a query does not impact other queries managed by the system.  Concretely, when multiple queris share a topic, pausing one of the queries will not stop the processing for the other queries.  This will be demonstrated with and without shared runtimes enabled.  
- Queries can be paused when multiple ksqlDB servers are in use.  (This demonstrates that the PAUSE messages use the ksqlDB command topic.)
- After a server restart, paused queries will remain in the PAUSED state.  No processing should happen during the server restart.

## LOEs and Delivery Milestones

Delivery should be a small number of PRs.

## Documentation Updates

Pages should be made for the two new verbs (PAUSE and RESUME) like (TERMINATE)[https://docs.ksqldb.io/en/latest/developer-guide/ksqldb-reference/terminate/].

## Compatibility Implications

No compatibility considerations.

## Security Implications

No security considerations.
