How is the kafka offset value computed? - apache-kafka

Is kafka offeset value unique per partition or per topic (considering same group id)?

It is unique per partition. start from zero and long data type.

It is a signed long, unique per partition and is incremented for every messages added to the partition log.

Related

Two different types of partitions in kafka producer

In Kafka producer, I am sending two different sets of data. I have two partitions for the topic. The first one is with a key and the second one is without a key. As far as I know the key is used to make partitions for the data. If the key is absent, null will be sent and the partition will be happening by round-robin scheduling.
But the question is if I am sending the data with and without key alternatively for some particular period of time, what will happen?
Will round robin scheduling happen for the partitions excluding the partition made by using key or will it happen for the all the two partitions?
Kafka select partition as per defined below rules
If used Custom Partitioner then partitioner will get selected based on Custom Partitioner logic.
If no Custom Partitioner then Kafka uses DefaultPartitioner
a. if the key is null then partition selected on round-robin.
b. If the key is non-null keys then It uses Murmur2 hash with modulo to identify partitions for the topic.
So message with key (null or not null) would get published on both partitions using Default Partitioner with no Custom Partitioner defined.
To achieve a message publish in a specific partition you can use the below method.
Pass partition explicitly while publishing a message
/**
* Creates a record to be sent to a specified topic and partition
*/
public ProducerRecord(String topic, Integer partition, K key, V value) {
this(topic, partition, null, key, value, null);
}
You can create Custom Partitioner and implement logic to select the partition
https://kafka.apache.org/10/javadoc/org/apache/kafka/clients/producer/Partitioner.html
I want to correct you. You said that the key is used to make partitions for the data. The key with a message is basically sent to get the message ordering for a specific field.
If key=null, data is sent round-robin (to a different partition and to a different broker in a distributed env. and of course to the same topic.).
If a key is sent, then all messages for that key will always go to the same partition.
Explain and example
key can be any string or integer, etc.. take an example of an integer employee_id as key.
So emplyee_id 123 will always go to partition 0, employee_id 345 will always go to partition 1. This is decided by the key hashing algorithm which depends on the number of partitions.
if you don't send any key then the message can go to any partition using a round-robin technique.
Kafka has a very organized scenario when it comes to sending and storing the records in the partitions. As you have mentioned, the Key is used for the purpose that the same key records go to the same partition. This helps in maintaining the chronology of those messages on that topic.
In your case, the two partitions will store the data as:
Partition 1: Store the data which contains a particular key with it. The records with this key will always go to this Partition. This is the concept of Custom Partitioning. Apart from this, the key with null values will also go to this partition as it follows the Round Robin Fashion to store the records
Partition 2: This partition will contain records which are entered without any key. i.e the key is null.

Kafka and timestamp ordering within a single topic partition for ingestion time

When exclusively reading messages from a single partition living in a Kafka topic where timestamps are configured for ingestion (broker) time, can I assume that all message retrieved from the partition will always be in strict timestamp order?
Kafka provides ordering guarantees while storing as well as retrieving messages i.e messages are stored & retrieved in the order they are sent.
Messages sent by a producer to a particular topic partition will be appended in the order they are sent. That is, if a record M1 is sent by the same producer as a record M2, and M1 is sent first, then M1 will have a lower offset(as well as lower Timestamp) than M2 and appear earlier in the log.
A consumer instance sees records in the order they are stored in the log.
However , Kafka only provides a total order over records within a partition, not between different partitions in a topic. But, if you require a total order over records this can be achieved with a topic that has only one partition, though this will mean only one consumer process per consumer group(Not suggested). Using this analogy , if you have only 1 partition , then it's a yes for your use-case but if more partitions then again a yes for ordering on per partition basis but ordering can't be guaranteed across the topic(multiple partitions).
Yes I was talking about a Kafka topic when it is explicitly configured for log append time.
I'm assuming that since the broker determines the timestamp and the broker owns a particular partition that timestamps in that partition will reflect timestamp order.
Rephrasing the question, is this always true within a single partition configured for log append time:
timestamp x <= timestamp y
where
offset x < offset y
Thanks.

What values do Kafka offsets have and what do they mean?

I understand that the offset is used to determine which messages a consumer wants. But is the offset a hash? Is it a timestamp? Is it simply an integer, where 3 could mean the last 3 messages?
An offset is "a sequential id number [..] that uniquely identifies each record within the partition" (source: Kafka documentation).
It starts at 0, which is the first record ever published in a given partition. It increases monotonically with each record added to the partition.

Uneven Distribution of messages in Kafka Partitions

I have a topic with 10 partitions, 1 consumer group with 4 consumers and worker size is 3.
I could see there is an uneven distribution of messages in the partitions, One partition is having so much data and another one is free.
How can I make my producer to evenly distribute the load into all the partitions, so that all partitions are being utilized properly?
According to the JavaDoc comment in the DefaultPartitioner class itself, the default partitioning strategy is:
If a partition is specified in the record, use it.
If no partition is specified but a key is present choose a partition based on a hash of the key.
If no partition or key is present choose a partition in a round-robin fashion.
https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/clients/src/main/java/org/apache/kafka/clients/producer/internals/DefaultPartitioner.java
So here are two possible reasons that may be causing the uneven distribution, depending on whether you are specifying a key while producing the message or not:
If you are specifying a key and you are getting an uneven distribution using the DefaultPartitioner, the most apparent explanation would be that you are specifying the same key multiple times.
If you are not specifying a key and using the DefaultPartitioner, a non-obvious behavior could be happening. According to the above you would expect round-robin distribution of messages, but this is not necessarily the case. An optimization introduced in 0.8.0 could be causing the same partition to be used. Check this link for a more detailed explanation: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/FAQ#FAQ-Whyisdatanotevenlydistributedamongpartitionswhenapartitioningkeyisnotspecified? .
Instead of going for the default partitioner class you can assign the producer with a partition number so that message directly goes to the specified partition,
ProducerRecord<String, String> record = new ProducerRecord<String, String>(topicName, partitionNumber,key, value);
Seems like your problem is uneven consumption of messages rather than uneven producing of messages to Kafka topic. In other words, your amount of reading threads doesn't match amount of partitions you have (they do not need to match 1:1 though, only be the same amout of partitions to read from per each consumer thread).
See short explanation for more details.
You can make use of the key parameter of the producer record. Here is a thing that for a specific key the data goes in to the same partition always now, I don’t know the structure of your producer record but as you said you have 10 partition then you can use simply n%10 as your producer record key.
Where n is 0 to 9 now your for record 0 key will be 0 and then kafka will generate a hash key and put it in some partition say partition 0, and for record 1 it will be one and then it will go into the 1st partition and so on.
This way you will able to apply round robin on your producer record your key will be independent from the fields in your record so you can have a variable n and key as n%10.
Or you can specify the partition in your producer record. So either you use the key or the partition field of the producer record.
If you have defined partitioner from record let's say in Kafka key is string and value is student Pojo.
In student Pojo let's say based on student country field, I want to go in a specific partition. Imagine that there is 10 partitions in a topic and for example, in value, "India" is a country and based on "India" we got partition number 5.
Whenever country is "India", Kafka will allocate the 5 number partition and that record goes to the partition number 5 always (if the partition has not changed).
Let's say that in your pipeline there are lots of records which are coming and have a country "India", all those records will go to partition number 5, and you will see uneven distribution in Kafka partition.
In my case, I used the default partitioner but still had much much more records in one partition than in others. The problem was I unexpectedly had many records with the same key. Check your keys!
As I was unable to resolve this with Faust, the approach I am using is to implement the 'round-robin' distribution myself.
I iterate over my records to produce and do for example:
for index, message in enumerate(messages):
topic.send(message, partition=index % num_partitions)
I.e. bound my index to within the range of partitions I have.
There could still be unevenness - consider you repeatedly run this but your number of records is less than your num_partitions - then your first partitions will keep getting the major share of messages. You can avoid this issue by adding a random offset:
import random
initial_partition = random.randrange(0, num_partitions)
for index, message in enumerate(messages):
topic.send(message, partition=(initial_partition + index) % num_partitions)

How many records are stored in each offset of kafka partition?

I came across the below kafka official statement
For each topic, the Kafka cluster maintains a partitioned log
Each partition is an ordered, immutable sequence of records that is continually appended to—a structured commit log. The records in the partitions are each assigned a sequential id number called the offset that uniquely identifies each record within the partition.
So, Lets say we have a kafka topic called "emprecords" and just assume that it has only one partition for now and in that partition let's say we have 10 offset starting from 0 to 9
My question is
Does each offset has got the ability to store only one record?
Or
Does each offset has got the ability to store more than one records?
For each partition, each offset can only be assigned to one record.