8.2.14 Confluent Kafka

• Confluent is a primary adopter of Kafka Connect and their Confluent Platform offering includes extensions over the standard Kafka Connect functionality. This includes Avro serialization and deserialization, and an Avro schema registry. Much of the Kafka Connect functionality is available in Apache Kafka.
• You can use Oracle GoldenGate for Big Data Kafka Connect Handler to replicate to Confluent Kafka. The Kafka Connect Handler is a Kafka Connect source connector. You can capture database changes from any database supported by Oracle GoldenGate and stream that change of data through the Kafka Connect layer to Kafka.
• Kafka Connect uses proprietary objects to define the schemas (org.apache.kafka.connect.data.Schema) and the messages (org.apache.kafka.connect.data.Struct). The Kafka Connect Handler can be configured to manage what data is published and the structure of the published data.
• The Kafka Connect Handler does not support any of the pluggable formatters that are supported by the Kafka Handler.