A fantastic Independence Day to all the Debezium users in the U.S.! But that’s not the only reason to celebrate: it’s also with great happiness that I’m announcing the release of Debezium 0.8.0.CR1!
Following our new release scheme, the focus for this candidate release of Debezium 0.8 has been to fix bug reported for last week’s Beta release, accompanied by a small number of newly implemented features.
Thanks a lot to everyone testing the new Antlr-based DDL parser for the MySQL connector; based on the issues you reported, we were able to fix a few bugs in it. As announced recently, for 0.8 the legacy parser will remain the default implementation, but you are strongly encouraged to test out the new one (by setting the connector option ddl.parser.mode to antlr) and report any findings you may have. We’ve planned to switch to the new implementation by default in Debezium 0.9.
In terms of new features, the CR1 release brings support for CITEXT columns in the Postgres connector (DBZ-762). All the relational connectors support it now to convey the original name and length of captured columns using schema parameters in the emitted change messages (DBZ-644). This can come in handy to properly size columns in a sink database for types such as VARCHAR.
Thanks a lot to the following community members who contributed to this release: Andreas Bergmeier, Olavi Mustanoja and Orr Ganani.
Please take a look at the change log for the complete list of changes in 0.8.0.CR1 and general upgrade notes.
What’s next?
Barring any unforeseen issues and critical bug reports, we’ll release Debezium 0.8.0.Final next week.
Once that’s out, we’ll continue work on the Oracle connector (e.g. exploring alternatives to using XStream for ingesting changes from the database as well as initial snapshotting), which remains a "tech preview" component as of 0.8.
We’ll also work towards a connector for SQL Server (see DBZ-40), for which the first steps just have been made today by preparing a Docker-based setup with a CDC-enabled SQL Server instance, allowing to implement and test the connector in the following.
To find out about some more long term ideas, please check out our roadmap and get in touch with us, if you got any ideas or suggestions for future development.
Gunnar Morling
Gunnar is a software engineer at Decodable and an open-source enthusiast by heart. He has been the project lead of Debezium over many years. Gunnar has created open-source projects like kcctl, JfrUnit, and MapStruct, and is the spec lead for Bean Validation 2.0 (JSR 380). He’s based in Hamburg, Germany.
About Debezium
Debezium is an open source distributed platform that turns your existing databases into event streams, so applications can see and respond almost instantly to each committed row-level change in the databases. Debezium is built on top of Kafka and provides Kafka Connect compatible connectors that monitor specific database management systems. Debezium records the history of data changes in Kafka logs, so your application can be stopped and restarted at any time and can easily consume all of the events it missed while it was not running, ensuring that all events are processed correctly and completely. Debezium is open source under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
Get involved
We hope you find Debezium interesting and useful, and want to give it a try. Follow us on Twitter @debezium, chat with us on Zulip, or join our mailing list to talk with the community. All of the code is open source on GitHub, so build the code locally and help us improve ours existing connectors and add even more connectors. If you find problems or have ideas how we can improve Debezium, please let us know or log an issue.
