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2. Table & SQL Connectors
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4. Debezium

Debezium Format

Changelog-Data-Capture Format Format: Deserialization Schema

• Dependencies
• How to use Debezium format
• Format Options
• Caveats
  • Consuming data produced by Debezium Postgres Connector
• Data Type Mapping

Debezium is a CDC (Changelog Data Capture) tool that can stream changes in real-time from MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and many other databases into Kafka. Debezium provides a unified format schema for changelog and supports to serialize messages using JSON and Apache Avro.

Flink supports to interpret Debezium JSON messages as INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE messages into Flink SQL system. This is useful in many cases to leverage this feature, such as

• synchronizing incremental data from databases to other systems
• auditing logs
• real-time materialized views on databases
• temporal join changing history of a database table and so on.

Note: Support for interpreting Debezium Avro messages and emitting Debezium messages is on the roadmap.

Dependencies

In order to setup the Debezium format, the following table provides dependency information for both projects using a build automation tool (such as Maven or SBT) and SQL Client with SQL JAR bundles.

Note: please refer to Debezium documentation about how to setup a Debezium Kafka Connect to synchronize changelog to Kafka topics.

How to use Debezium format

Debezium provides a unified format for changelog, here is a simple example for an update operation captured from a MySQL products table:

{
  "before": {
    "id": 111,
    "name": "scooter",
    "description": "Big 2-wheel scooter",
    "weight": 5.18
  },
  "after": {
    "id": 111,
    "name": "scooter",
    "description": "Big 2-wheel scooter",
    "weight": 5.15
  },
  "source": {...},
  "op": "u",
  "ts_ms": 1589362330904,
  "transaction": null
}

Note: please refer to Debezium documentation about the meaning of each fields.

The MySQL products table has 4 columns (id, name, description and weight). The above JSON message is an update change event on the products table where the weight value of the row with id = 111 is changed from 5.18 to 5.15. Assuming this messages is synchronized to Kafka topic products_binlog, then we can use the following DDL to consume this topic and interpret the change events.

• SQL

CREATE TABLE topic_products (
  -- schema is totally the same to the MySQL "products" table
  id BIGINT,
  name STRING,
  description STRING,
  weight DECIMAL(10, 2)
) WITH (
 'connector' = 'kafka',
 'topic' = 'products_binlog',
 'properties.bootstrap.servers' = 'localhost:9092',
 'properties.group.id' = 'testGroup',
 'format' = 'debezium-json'  -- using debezium-json as the format
)

In some cases, users may setup the Debezium Kafka Connect with the Kafka configuration 'value.converter.schemas.enable' enabled to include schema in the message. Then the Debezium JSON message may look like this:

{
  "schema": {...},
  "payload": {
    "before": {
      "id": 111,
      "name": "scooter",
      "description": "Big 2-wheel scooter",
      "weight": 5.18
    },
    "after": {
      "id": 111,
      "name": "scooter",
      "description": "Big 2-wheel scooter",
      "weight": 5.15
    },
    "source": {...},
    "op": "u",
    "ts_ms": 1589362330904,
    "transaction": null
  }
}

In order to interpret such messages, you need to add the option 'debezium-json.schema-include' = 'true' into above DDL WITH clause (false by default). Usually, this is not recommended to include schema because this makes the messages very verbose and reduces parsing performance.

After registering the topic as a Flink table, then you can consume the Debezium messages as a changelog source.

• SQL

-- a real-time materialized view on the MySQL "products"
-- which calculate the latest average of weight for the same products
SELECT name, AVG(weight) FROM topic_products GROUP BY name;

-- synchronize all the data and incremental changes of MySQL "products" table to
-- Elasticsearch "products" index for future searching
INSERT INTO elasticsearch_products
SELECT * FROM topic_products;

Format Options

Caveats

Consuming data produced by Debezium Postgres Connector

If you are using Debezium Connector for PostgreSQL to capture the changes to Kafka, please make sure the REPLICA IDENTITY configuration of the monitored PostgreSQL table has been set to FULL which is by default DEFAULT. Otherwise, Flink SQL currently will fail to interpret the Debezium data.

In FULL strategy, the UPDATE and DELETE events will contain the previous values of all the table’s columns. In other strategies, the “before” field of UPDATE and DELETE events will only contain primary key columns or null if no primary key. You can change the REPLICA IDENTITY by running ALTER TABLE <your-table-name> REPLICA IDENTITY FULL. See more details in Debezium Documentation for PostgreSQL REPLICA IDENTITY.

Data Type Mapping

Currently, the Debezium format uses JSON format for deserialization. Please refer to JSON format documentation for more details about the data type mapping.