Addressing a long standing feature request (DBZ-1068), the Debezium connector for SQL Server supports now server-side column filtering: capture instances in the database itself can be configured so to only contain a sub-set of the captured table’s columns. That way, specific columns can be excluded by the CDC process right away, instead of only removing them in the Debezium connector, which is much more efficient for large BLOB for instance.

The MySQL connector adds support for the column.include.list option already known from the Debezium Postgres connector (DBZ-2508).

Related to the matter of filtering, following up on the work begun in the 1.3 Beta1 release around replacing the terms "master/slave", "blacklist" and "whitelist" with more inclusive alternatives, also all the incubating connectors (Oracle, Db2, Cassandra) use the new terms like "database.include.list", "primary/replica", etc. now (DBZ-2462).

The Debezium Oracle connector can now use the LogMiner package to ingest change events. As this package comes with the Oracle database itself, it’s a very attractive alternative to the existing XStream-based implementation. Discussions and work towards LogMiner support have been happening in the Debezium community for a long time (as you already might have guessed from the very low issue number DBZ-137), so we’re particularly excited about this work being merged eventually and being part of this release.

Note that there’s several follow-up tasks to be resolved related to the LogMiner-based ingestion implementation; while it is not recommended for production usage at this point, we’d love to get your feedback from testing and evaluating!

A massive thank you to everyone involved with this: Andrey Ignatenko and his team for the main work, Andrey Pustovetov for his ideas around transaction buffering, Chris Cranford for picking up the PR and preparing it to get merged, Milo vd Zee for his extensive review, as well as everyone else commenting and providing feedback on the PR and Jira issue.

In addition to these key features, the community has completed the work on some other features and fixes, too:

As always, please refer to the release notes for the complete list of resolved issues as well as procedures for upgrading from earlier Debezium versions.

Thank you so much to all the community members contributing to this release: Aaron Brady, Andrey Ignatenko, Bingqin Zhou, Eric Weaver, Grant Cooksey, Grzegorz Kołakowski, Guy Pascarella, James Gormley, Jos Huiting, Mickaël Isaert, and Nathan Mills.

With the first cut of LogMiner support being merged and released, we’re now planning to focus on stabilization and bug fixing, with the Debezium 1.3 Final release to be expected around the end of the month.

In parallel, work is happening on a new connector contributed by the community for the Vitess (which will - depending on progress of review - be released as an incubating connector either in Debezium 1.3 or 1.4), and we’re going to share some exciting efforts around a proof-of-concept for a potential future Debezium UI with you very soon!