Debezium, partitions assigment using primary key - apache-kafka

I'm new with debezium and I can't find information about sending messages from database to kafka with specific keys. It is possible to configure debzium to send messages with special key based on one of primary keys? Can I achive this using debezium transforms or some regex?

There is a topic routing SMT as per this documentation page which does a little bit more than just changing Kafka record key. I will still suggest to be careful because Kafka partitioning guarantees event ordering within the partition. Changing it can break the ordering guarantee Debezium provides.

Related

Set kafka message key to source database name in Debezium Postgresql

We are trying to collect changes from a number of Postgresql databases using Debezium.
The idea is to create a single topic with a number of partitions equal to the number of databases - each database gets its own partition, because order of events matters.
We managed to reroute events to a single topic using topic routing, but to be able to partition events by databases I need to set message key properly.
Qestion: Is there a way we can set kafka message key to be equal to the source database name?
My thougts:
Maybe there is a way to set message key globally per connector configuration?
Database name can be found in the message, but its a nested property payload.source.name. Didn't find a way to extract value from a nested propery.
Any thoughts?
Thank you in advance!
You'd need to write/find a Connect transform that can extract nested fields and set the message key, or if you don't mind duplicating data within Kafka topics, you can use Kafka Streams / KsqlDB, etc to do the same.
Overall, I don't think one topic + one partition per database is a good design for scalability of consumers. Sure, it'll keep order, but it's not much overhead to simply create one topic per database with only one partition. Then make consumers read all topics using a regex pattern rather than needing to assign to specific/all partitions in one topic.

How does Debezium guarantee all events within a single topic 'totally-ordered'?

As I read from Debezium's FAQs, it is said that:
Most connectors will record all events for a single database table to a single topic. Additionally, all events within a topic are totally-ordered, meaning that the order of all of those events will be maintained.
How are events for a database organized?
However, AFAIK Apache Kafka only has ordering guarantees within a single partition. So if I expect the events in a topic to be ordered, I have to set that topic having only one partition, which sacrifices the throughput of Kafka, otherwise with other mechanism. But I didn't see any explanation about this in Debezium's documentation.
My question is, how does Debezium implement the ordering guarantees within one topic? Or which module of the source code should I study to find out the detailed implementation of this feature?
to quote the answer here:
... Kafka Connect’s producer will use the default partitioning logic that computes the partition using a consistent hash of the message key, which in Debezium’s case is a struct containing the affected row’s primary/unique key...
So if the concern is that the same row/document should not be read out of order, then the concern is ruled out because the PK will always send the the event to the same partition

Kafka Streams - KTable from topic with retention policy

I'm experimenting with kafka streams and I have the following setup:
I have an existing kafka topic with a key space that is unbounded (but predictable and well known).
My topic has a retention policy (in bytes) to age out old records.
I'd like to materialize this topic into a Ktable where I can use the Interactive Queries API to retrieve records by key.
Is there any way to make my KTable "inherit" the retention policy from my topic? So that when records are aged out of the primary topic, they're no longer available in the ktable?
I'm worried about dumping all of the records into the KTable and having the StateStore grow unbounded.
One solution that I can think of is to transform into a windowed stream with hopping windows equal to a TimeToLive for the record, but I'm wondering if there's a better solution in a more native way.
Thanks.
It is unfortunately not support atm. There is a JIRA though: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-4212
Another possibility would be to insert tombstone messages (<key,null>) into the input topic. The KTable would pick those up and delete the corresponding key from the store.

What does semantic partition function means in Kafka?

All. Forgive me I was just learning the Apache Kafka. When I was reading the document of Kafka. It mentioned a phrase named semantic partition function.
As the document says.
Producers publish data to the topics of their choice. The producer is
responsible for choosing which record to assign to which partition
within the topic. This can be done in a round-robin fashion simply to
balance load or it can be done according to some semantic partition
function (say based on some key in the record). More on the use of
partitioning in a second!
What does it mean semantic partition in Kafka? So far I didn't found any more about it in the document. Could someone please help to explain more about it for better understanding? Thanks.
When the producer doesn't specify a key for messages, the round robin fashion is used. When a key is specified, the DefaultPartitioner just process an hash on the key (module the number of partitions). If you want, you can use your own partitioner class. The documentation wants just to say that : that the "semantic" for defining the destination partition is up to you, you can develop the "function" (really a partitioner class). For example, instead of using the Kafka key in the message you could have a payload, let me say a JSON, with some data and you want to use one of this info for processing the right destination partition.

What's the purpose of Kafka's key/value pair-based messaging?

All of the examples of Kafka | producers show the ProducerRecord's key/value pair as not only being the same type (all examples show <String,String>), but the same value. For example:
producer.send(new ProducerRecord<String, String>("someTopic", Integer.toString(i), Integer.toString(i)));
But in the Kafka docs, I can't seem to find where the key/value concept (and its underlying purpose/utility) is explained. In traditional messaging (ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, etc.) I've always fired a message at a particular topic/queue/exchange. But Kafka is the first broker that seems to require key/value pairs instead of just a regulare 'ole string message.
So I ask: What is the purpose/usefulness of requiring producers to send KV pairs?
Kafka uses the abstraction of a distributed log that consists of partitions. Splitting a log into partitions allows to scale-out the system.
Keys are used to determine the partition within a log to which a message get's appended to. While the value is the actual payload of the message. The examples are actually not very "good" with this regard; usually you would have a complex type as value (like a tuple-type or a JSON or similar) and you would extract one field as key.
See: http://kafka.apache.org/intro#intro_topics and http://kafka.apache.org/intro#intro_producers
In general the key and/or value can be null, too. If the key is null a random partition will the selected. If the value is null it can have special "delete" semantics in case you enable log-compaction instead of log-retention policy for a topic (http://kafka.apache.org/documentation#compaction).
Late addition... Specifying the key so that all messages on the same key go to the same partition is very important for proper ordering of message processing if you will have multiple consumers in a consumer group on a topic.
Without a key, two messages on the same key could go to different partitions and be processed by different consumers in the group out of order.
Another interesting use case
We could use the key attribute in Kafka topics for sending user_ids and then can plug in a consumer to fetch streaming events (events stored in value attributes). This could allow you to process any max-history of user event sequences for creating features in your machine learning models.
I still have to find out if this is possible or not. Will keep updating my answer with further details.