Jan 9, 2020

Exploring ksqlDB window start time

Prompted by a question on StackOverflow I had a bit of a dig into how windows behave in ksqlDB, specifically with regards to their start time. This article shows also how to create test data in ksqlDB and create data to be handled with a timestamp in the past. For a general background to windowing in ksqlDB see the excellent docs. The nice thing about recent releases of ksqlDB/KSQL is that you can create and populate streams directly with CREATE STREAM and INSERT INTO respectively.

Jan 8, 2020

Streaming messages from RabbitMQ into Kafka with Kafka Connect

This was prompted by a question on StackOverflow to which I thought the answer would be straightforward, but turned out not to be so. And then I got a bit carried away and ended up with a nice example of how you can handle schema-less data coming from a system such as RabbitMQ and apply a schema to it. Note This same pattern for ingesting bytes and applying a schema will work with other connectors such as MQTT What?

Dec 20, 2019

Analysing network behaviour with ksqlDB and MongoDB

In this post I want to build on my previous one and show another use of the Syslog data that I’m capturing. Instead of looking for SSH attacks, I’m going to analyse the behaviour of my networking components. Note You can find all the code to run this on GitHub. Getting Syslog data into Kafka As before, let’s create ourselves a syslog connector in ksqlDB: CREATE SOURCE CONNECTOR SOURCE_SYSLOG_UDP_01 WITH ( 'tasks.

Dec 18, 2019

Detecting and Analysing SSH Attacks with ksqlDB

I’ve written previously about ingesting Syslog into Kafka and using KSQL to analyse it. I want to revisit the subject since it’s nearly two years since I wrote about it and some things have changed since then. ksqlDB now includes the ability to define connectors from within it, which makes setting things up loads easier. You can find the full rig to run this on GitHub. Create and configure the Syslog connector To start with, create a source connector:

May 9, 2019

A poor man’s KSQL EXPLODE/UNNEST technique

There is an open issue for support of EXPLODE/UNNEST functionality in KSQL, and if you need it then do up-vote the issue. Here I detail a hacky, but effective, workaround for exploding arrays into multiple messages—so long as you know the upper-bound on your array.

Apr 17, 2019

Pivoting Aggregates in Ksql

Prompted by a question on StackOverflow, the requirement is to take a series of events related to a common key and for each key output a series of aggregates derived from a changing value in the events. I’ll use the data from the question, based on ticket statuses. Each ticket can go through various stages, and the requirement was to show, per customer, how many tickets are currently at each stage.

Apr 12, 2019

Connecting KSQL to a Secured Schema Registry

Confluent Cloud now includes a secured Schema Registry, which you can use from external applications, including KSQL.

To configure KSQL for it you need to set:

ksql.schema.registry.url=https://<Schema Registry endpoint>
ksql.schema.registry.basic.auth.credentials.source=USER_INFO
ksql.schema.registry.basic.auth.user.info=<Schema Registry API Key>:<Schema Registry API Secret>

Mar 28, 2019

Exploring KSQL Stream-Stream Joins

Introduction

What can you use stream-stream joins for? Can you use them to join between a stream of orders and stream of related shipments to do useful things? What’s not supported in KSQL, where are the cracks?

Mar 25, 2019

Terminate All KSQL Queries

Before you can drop a stream or table that’s populated by a query in KSQL, you have to terminate any queries upon which the object is dependent. Here’s a bit of jq & xargs magic to terminate all queries that are currently running

Jan 21, 2019

How KSQL handles case

KSQL is generally case-sensitive. Very sensitive, at times ;-)

Jan 17, 2019

KSQL REST API cheatsheet

Full reference is here

Dec 12, 2018

Streaming data from Oracle into Kafka

This is a short summary discussing what the options are for integrating Oracle RDBMS into Kafka, as of December 2018 (refreshed June 2020). For a more detailed background to why and how at a broader level for all databases (not just Oracle) see this blog and this talk. What techniques & tools are there? Franck Pachot has written up an excellent analysis of the options available here. As of June 2020, this is what the line-up looks like: