Querying kafka messages - apache-kafka

I have a kafka message producer (KafkaProducer) in my spark streaming application.For this I need to detect if a message.value is already exists in the kafka before sending it in my producer
Is there any tool so I can query kafka messages? I don't want to consume message and just querying already existing messages..

Short answer: This is not possible with built-in Kafka functionality.
Maybe you can explain why you need such functionality in your current use case, as there might be other ways to achieve what you want to do.

If you have to lookup key before inserting the value, you might need to use Hbase or MongoDB, or more options: Elasticsearch, Cassandra.
Kafka is a data buffer and it's purpose is for decoupling the system.
You should use the technologies on the right way :)

Related

Kafka Connect vs Apache Nifi

Good Afternoon, my question is pretty simple, I'm new in Apache Kafka but I'm doing some work as part of my internship which is why I came with the question.
I will provide the context as much as I can, so I hope someone can help me, I want to clear my doubts.
I was requested to develop a pipeline (or workflow) using first Apache Nifi.
This pipeline consisted of the following.
I fetched data from one local MySQL database using Nifi, then the data was sent to one Kafka topic which was later processed to clean some raw data using the Kafka Client with Java (KStream, KTable and some regular expressions) and sent again to one kafka topic.
Once the processing was done, the new data was read again using Apache Nifi, and then sent to a new MySQL table.
I provide a picture for a better undertanding.
General Pipeline
After it, I was requested to do the same but using Kafka Connect instead of Apache Nifi, which was even shorter because I only had to use the Source connector to read the data from the MySQL database to sent it to one kafka topic, then process it with the Kafka Client with Java and sent it to a new kafka topic. Finally use the Sink connector to save the processed data of the new topic to sent it straight to one new table in the database.
So, someone in charge asked me when I should use Apache Nifi + Kafka instead of Kafka Connect + Kafka and I have no idea being honest.
So let's consider that the most important point here is apply Data Enrichment and let's consider two scenaries:
when I have data from different source but the data is not streaming data AND when the data is streaming data as well as not.
And all of it needs to be processed, integrated, cleaned and finally unified to apply data enrichment.
If I consider the context provided previously my questions and doubts are:
when should I use or not Nifi and Kafka? and why?
When should I use or not Kafka Connect with Kafka? and why?
I think I have one basic idea, and I have been reading in order to be able to answer it for myself, but being honest, I haven't come with one acceptable answer or clearly idea of when to use each one.
So, I would really appreciate your help.

Kafka streams vs Kafka connect for Kafka HBase ETL pipeline

I have straightforward scenario for the ETL job: take data from Kafka topic and put it to HBase table. In the future i'm going to add the support for some logic after reading data from a topic.
I consider two scenario:
use Kafka Streams for reading data from a topic and further writing via native HBased driver each record
Use Kafka -> HBase connector
I have the next concerns about my options:
Is is a goo idea to write data each time it arrives in a Kafka Stream's window? - suggest that it'll downgrade performance
Kafka Hbase connector is supported only by third-party developer, i'm not sure about code quality of this solution and about the option to add custom aggregation logic over data from a topic.
I myself have been trying to search for ETL options for KAFKA to HBase, however, so far my research tells me that it's a not a good idea to have an external system interaction within a KAFKA streams application (check the answer here and here). KAFKA streams are super powerful and great if you have KAFKA->Transform_message->KAFKA kind of use case, and eventually you can have KAFKA connect that will take your data from KAFKA topic and write it to a sink.
Since you do not want to use the third party KAFKA connect for HBase, one option is to write something yourself using the connect API, the other option is to use the KAFKA consumer producer API and write the app using the traditional way, poll the messages, write to sink, commit the batch and move on.

Is it good approach to write Kafka Streams for persisting into database?

Just wondering what sort of problems I might face while writing persistence layer with Kafka Streams Builder, or any suggestions to use like Kafka Connect JDBC (Sink)?
Yes, use Kafka Connect—streaming from a topic to a datastore is precisely what it is for :)
If you want to process/enrich your data before landing it to a database you can use KStreams (or KSQL), and stream to a second topic, which you then hook up to Connect.

What should I use: Kafka Stream or Kafka consumer api or Kafka connect

I would like to know what would be best for me: Kafka stream or Kafka consumer api or Kafka connect?
I want to read data from topic then do some processing and write to database. So I have written consumers but I feel I can write Kafka stream application and use it's stateful processor to perform any changes and write it to database which can eliminate my consumer code and only have to write db code.
Databases I want to insert my records are:
HDFS - (insert raw JSON)
MSSQL - (processed json)
Another option is Kafka connect but I have found there is no json support as of now for hdfs sink and jdbc sink connector.(I don't want to write in avro) and creating schema is also pain for complex nested messages.
Or should I write custom Kafka connect to do this.
So need you opinion on whether I should write Kafka consumer or Kafka stream or Kafka connect?
And what will be better in terms of performance and have less overhead?
You can use a combination of them all
I have tried HDFS sink for JSON but not able to use org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter
Not clear why not. But I would assume you forgot to set schemas.enabled=false.
when I set org.apache.kafka.connect.storage.StringConverter it works but it writes the json object in string escaped format. For eg. {"name":"hello"} is written into hdfs as "{\"name\":\"hello\"}"
Yes, it will string-escape the JSON
Processing I want to do is basic validation and few field values transformation
Kafka Streams or Consumer API is capable of validation. Connect is capable of Simple Message Transforms (SMT)
Some use cases, you need to "duplicate data" onto Kafka; process your "raw" topic, read it using a consumer, then produce it back into a "cleaned" topic, from which you can use Kafka Connect to write to a database or filesystem.
Welcome to stack overflow! Please take the tout https://stackoverflow.com/tour
Please make posts with precise question, not asking for opinions - this makes the site clearer, and opinions are not answers (and subject to every person preferences). Asking "How to use Kafka-connect with json" - or so would fit this site.
Also, please show some research.
Less overhead would be kafka consumer - kafka stream and kafka connect use kafka consumer, so you will always be able to make less overhead, but will also lose all benefits (tolerant to failures, easy of usage, support, etc)
First, it depends of what your processing is. Aggregation? Counting? Validation? Then, you can use kafka streams to do the processing and write the result to a new topic, on the format you want.
Then, you can use kafka connect to send the data to your database. You are not forced to use avro, you can use other format for key/value, see
Kafka Connect HDFS Sink for JSON format using JsonConverter
Kafka Connect not outputting JSON

Query Kafka topic for specific record

Is there an elegant way to query a Kafka topic for a specific record? The REST API that I'm building gets an ID and needs to look up records associated with that ID in a Kafka topic. One approach is to check every record in the topic via a custom consumer and look for a match, but I'd like to avoid the overhead of reading a bunch of records. Does Kafka have a fast, built in filtering capability?
The only fast way to search for a record in Kafka (to oversimplify) is by partition and offset. The new producer class can return, via futures, the partition and offset into which a message was written. You can use these two values to very quickly retrieve the message.
So if you make the ID out of the partition and offset then you can implement your fast query. Otherwise, not so much. This means that the ID for an object isn't part of your data model, but rather is generated by the Kafka-knowledgable code.
Maybe that works for you, maybe it doesn't.
This might be late for you, but it will help for how other see this question, now there is KSQL, kafka sql is an open-source streaming SQL engine
https://github.com/confluentinc/ksql/