In Debezium 3.3.0.Alpha1, users reported problems when using heartbeat.action.query that Debezium was emitting heartbeat events constantly regardless of the configured interval. This regression is fixed and heartbeat.action.query should now honor the configured heartbeat.interval.ms once again (DBZ-9340).

Debezium users can now start the MongoDB source connector at a specific position in the MongoDB oplog by specifying a new connector configuration property, capture.start.op.time, in the connector configuration. This new configuration property should be a long data type value that represents the Bson timestamp (DBZ-9240).

In Debezium 3.3.0.Alpha1 we introduced support for the text-search based vector data type called TSVECTOR as part of the PostgreSQL source connector (DBZ-8470). In this release, we’ve extended that support to the JDBC sink connector so that TSVECTOR values can be written to PostgreSQL targets (DBZ-8471). If the target is a non-PostgreSQL database, the value will be written into a character-based column instead.

While we generally do not document internal configuration properties, we did add a new internal PostgreSQL connector configuration property internal.create.slot.command.timeout in the past to apply a set default timeout of 90 seconds when creating the connector’s replication slot. This was to address concerns with blocking transactions that would prevent the connector from advancing as a replication slot cannot be created while transactions are active.

We’ve extended the coverage for the timeout in Debezium 3.3 to apply to the DDL operations for creating and altering the PostgreSQL connector’s publication (https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-9310). If you notice timeouts creating/updating the publication or the slot, you may want to increase this configuration property (defaults to 90) or set it to 0 to disable the timeout feature.

The Debezium for PostgreSQL pgoutput decoder uses a specific pattern to determine whether a toasted column’s value matches a predefined list of marker objects that indicate the value is absent in the change event. However, this pattern was inefficient when the event payload contained large text or binary data, due to the cost of computing hash values before comparison.

To improve performance, the implementation now uses a direct equality check, avoiding expensive hash computations for large TOAST column payloads (DBZ-9345). This change reduces processing overhead when handling events with sizable text or binary data.

The heartbeat behavior in SQL Server will now emit heartbeat events during periods where there are no changes in the capture instances for CDC-based tables (DBZ-9364). This should help make sure that while the LSN continues to advance in the database due to changes to non-captured tables, the offsets remain synchronized.

Debezium 3.3 also brings several new improvements to the Debezium Platform to improve the user experience.

One of the first improvements is around error handling and messaging. We’ve improved this process to provide significantly better descriptions to help users in the user interface (DBZ-8836), as shown here:

In addition, the Platform now provides users the ability to define fine-grained logging configuration as the user interface, which can be extremely useful when debugging or diagnosing a connector-related problem (DBZ-8890), seen here:

And lastly where were some improvements around adding details when defining source and destination types (DBZ-9373). We’ve included a video below that outlines how these work