One of the team’s ongoing tasks include the migration of Debezium UI’s backend into the main Debezium repository. One of the unique benefits with doing this is we can identify where there is code overlap between a connector’s runtime and the UI, and develop interface contracts to expose this shared data.

Thanks to a community contribution for DBZ-7167, the RelationalBaseSourceConnector contract has been adjusted and a new method introduced to return a list of table names that match the connector’s specific configuration. Any connector that implements this abstract base class will need to implement this new method.

When using schema registry, event schemas need to be registered with a name so that they can be looked up upon later inquiries by pipelines. So when pairing CloudEvents formatted messages with schema registry, the same applies and in Debezium 2.6, you can explicitly control how the name is registered.

By default, the schema for a CloudEvent message will be automatically generated by the converter. However, if the auto generated schema names are not sufficient, you can adjust the configuration by specifying dataSchemaName, which can be set either to generate (the default behavior) or header to pull the schema name directly from the specified event header field.

The Debezium Oracle connector maintains a buffer of all in-flight transactions, and this buffer can be allocated off-heap using Infinispan. Sometimes, the user configuration specifies that if an in-flight transaction lasts longer than the specified number of milliseconds, the transaction can be abandoned or discarded by the buffer. This means that the transaction will be forgotten and not emitted by the connector.

In order to improve metrics integration with frameworks like Grafana and Prometheus, a new JMX metric, AbandonedTransactionCount, was added to track the number of transactions that are abandoned by the connector during it’s runtime.

Google Spanner’s value capture type is responsible for controlling how the change stream represents the change data in the event stream and are configured when constructing the change stream.

Spanner introduced a new value capture mode called NEW_ROW_AND_OLD_VALUES, which is responsible for capturing all values of tracked columns, both modified and unmodified, whenever any column changes. This new mode is an improvement over NEW_ROW because it also includes the capture of old values, making it align with what you typically observe with other Debezium connectors.