Why? I’ve been blogging for quite a few years now, starting on Blogger, soon onto WordPress, and then to Ghost a couple of years ago. Blogger was fairly lame, WP yucky, but I really do like Ghost. It’s simple and powerful and was perfect for my needs. My needs being, an outlet for technical content that respected formatting, worked with a markup language (Markdown), and didn’t f**k things up in the way that WP often would in its WYSIWYG handling of content.

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A few years ago a colleague of mine told me about this thing called Docker, and I must admit I dismissed it as a fad…how wrong was I. Docker, and Docker Compose, are one of my key tools of the trade. With them I can build self-contained environments for tutorials, demos, conference talks etc. Tear it down, run it again, without worrying that somewhere a local config changed and will break things.

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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:

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I’ve written recently about how I create the diagrams in my blog posts and talks, and from discussions around that, a couple of people were interested more broadly in how I use my iPad Pro. So, on the basis that if two people are interested maybe others are (and if no-one else is, I have a copy-and-paste answer to give to those two people) here we go. Kit iPad Pro 10.

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I write and speak lots about Kafka, and get a fair few questions from this. The most common question is actually nothing to do with Kafka, but instead: How do you make those cool diagrams? So here’s a short, and longer, answer! Update July 2019 I’ve moved away from Paper -> read more here tl;dr An iOS app called Paper, from a company called FiftyThree So, how DO you make those cool diagrams?

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Install Not sure why the brew doesn’t work as it used to, but here’s how to get it working: brew install mtr sudo ln /usr/local/Cellar/mtr/0.92/sbin/mtr /usr/local/bin/mtr sudo ln /usr/local/Cellar/mtr/0.92/sbin/mtr-packet /usr/local/bin/mtr-packet (If you don’t do the two symbolic links (ln) you’ll get mtr: command not found or mtr: Failure to start mtr-packet: Invalid argument) Run sudo mtr google.com

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I do lots of work with Kafka Connect, almost entirely in Distributed mode—even just with 1 node -> makes scaling out much easier when/if needed. Because I’m using Distributed mode, I use the Kafka Connect REST API to configure and manage it. Whilst others might use GUI REST tools like Postman etc, I tend to just use the commandline. Here are some useful snippets that I use all the time.

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Doing some funky Docker Compose stuff, including:

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The problem - nested messages in Kafka

Data comes into Kafka in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes it’s from CDC tools, and may be nested like this:

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• Check out the jmxterm repository
• Download jmxterm from https://docs.cyclopsgroup.org/jmxterm

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See also docs. To help future Googlers… with the Confluent docker images for Kafka, KSQL, Kafka Connect, etc, if you want to access JMX metrics from within, you just need to pass two environment variables: <x>_JMX_HOSTNAME and <x>_JMX_PORT, prefixed by a component name. <x>_JMX_HOSTNAME - the hostname/IP of the JMX host machine, as accessible from the JMX Client. This is used by the JMX client to connect back into JMX, so must be accessible from the host machine running the JMX client.

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(SO answer repost) You can use kafkacat to send messages to Kafka that include line breaks. To do this, use its -D operator to specify a custom message delimiter (in this example /): kafkacat -b kafka:29092 \ -t test_topic_01 \ -D/ \ -P <<EOF this is a string message with a line break/this is another message with two line breaks! EOF Note that the delimiter must be a single byte - multi-byte chars will end up getting included in the resulting message See issue #140

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KSQL provides the ability to create windowed aggregations. For example, count the number of messages in a 1 minute window, grouped by a particular column: CREATE TABLE RATINGS_BY_CLUB_STATUS AS \ SELECT CLUB_STATUS, COUNT(*) AS RATING_COUNT \ FROM RATINGS_WITH_CUSTOMER_DATA \ WINDOW TUMBLING (SIZE 1 MINUTES) \ GROUP BY CLUB_STATUS; How KSQL, and Kafka Streams, stores the window timestamp associated with an aggregate, has recently changed. See #1497 for details. Whereas previously the Kafka message timestamp (accessible through the KSQL ROWTIME system column) stored the start of the window for which the aggregate had been calculated, this changed in July 2018 to instead be the timestamp of the latest message to update that aggregate value.

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There’s lots going on in the next few months :-) I’m particularly excited to be speaking at several notable conferences for the first time, including JavaZone, USENIX LISA, and Devoxx. As always, if you’re nearby then hope to see you there, and let me know if you want to meet for a coffee or beer! September 🇪🇸 Madrid, Spain 6th Sept: Madrid Kafka Meetup 🇳🇴 Oslo, Norway 10th Sept: Oslo Kafka Meetup 11th Sept: JavaZone 🇧🇪 Antwerp/Brussels, Belgium 25th Sept: Brussels Kafka Meetup 🇪🇸 Barcelona, Spain 26th Sept: Barcelona Kafka Meetup October 🇬🇧 Leeds, UK 4th Oct: The JVM Thing meetup 🇺🇸 Nashville (TN), USA 31st Oct: LISA18 November 🇩🇪 Münich, Germany 7th Nov: W-JAX 🇧🇪 Antwerp, Belgium 13th Nov: Devoxx Belgium 🇵🇱 Krakow, Poland 26th Nov: CoreDump December 🇬🇧 Liverpool, UK 4th Dec: UKOUG TECH 18 🇩🇪 Frankfurt, Germany 10th Dec: Apache Kafka Meetup 11th Dec: IT Days

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(This was cross-posted on the Confluent.io blog)

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This question comes up on StackOverflow and such places a lot, so here’s something to try and help.

tl;dr : You need to set advertised.listeners (or KAFKA_ADVERTISED_LISTENERS if you’re using Docker images) to the external address (host/IP) so that clients can correctly connect to it. Otherwise they’ll try to connect to the internal host address–and if that’s not reachable then problems ensue.

Put another way, courtesy of Spencer Ruport:

LISTENERS are what interfaces Kafka binds to. ADVERTISED_LISTENERS are how clients can connect.

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So you’ve got a code sample you want to share in a presentation, but whilst it looks beautiful in your text-editor with syntax highlighting, it’s fugly in Keynote? You could screenshot it and paste the image into your slide, but you just know that you’ll want to change that code, and end up re-snapshotting it…what a PITA. Better to have a nicely syntax-highlighted code snippet that you can paste as formatted text into Keynote and amend from there as needed.

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In this article I demonstrated how to use KSQL to filter streams of network event data. As well as filtering, KSQL can be used to easily enrich streams. In this article we’ll see how this enriched data can be used to drive analysis in Elasticsearch and Kibana—and how KSQL again came into use for building some stream processing as a result of the discovery made. The data came from my home Ubiquiti router, and took two forms:

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Hacky way to keep config files in sync when there’s a new version of some software. Caveat : probably completely wrong, may not pick up config entries added in the new version, etc. But, works for me right here right now ;-) So let’s say we have two folders: confluent-4.1.0 confluent-4.1.1 Same structures, different versions. 4.1.0 was set up with our local config in ./etc, that we want to preserve. We can use diff to easily see what’s changed:

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The Kafka Connect JDBC Connector by default does not cope so well with: NUMBER columns with no defined precision/scale. You may end up with apparent junk (bytes) in the output, or just errors. TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE. Throws JDBC type -102 not currently supported warning in the log. Read more about NUMBER data type in the Oracle docs. tl;dr : How do I make it work? There are several options:

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