Manage Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud

Use the Confluent Cloud Console to enable, view, query, and disable Lightning Tables, and to check their status.

Important

Lightning Tables are rolling out to Confluent Cloud accounts in phases. If you don’t see this feature, it’s not available for your account at this time.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure that you have the following:

A Apache Kafka® topic in a Confluent Cloud cluster.
A schema for the topic. If the topic doesn’t have one, the Cloud Console prompts you to create one when you enable the Lightning Table. For more information, see Enable a Lightning Table for a topic without a schema.

Enable a Lightning Table for a topic

You can enable a Lightning Table from the Lightning Tables page, the Topics page, or a topic’s Settings tab. Each one opens the same confirmation dialog.

After you confirm, the dialog shows the setup progress. Enabling a Lightning Table takes several minutes. You can close the dialog and check back later. When setup completes, a dialog opens that confirms the Lightning Table is enabled. Here, you can query the Lightning Table with SQL.

From the Lightning Tables page

To enable a Lightning Table from the cluster’s Lightning Tables page, see Get Started with Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud.

From the Topics page

To enable a Lightning Table from the Topics page, complete the following steps.

Sign in to the Confluent Cloud Console at https://confluent.cloud/.
From the navigation menu, select Environments.
Select your environment.
From the navigation menu, select Clusters.
Select your cluster.
From the cluster’s navigation menu, select Topics.
In the Lightning Tables column for your topic, click + Enable.

You might need to scroll right to see the column.
In the confirmation dialog, click Enable.

From a topic’s settings

To enable a Lightning Table from a topic’s settings, complete the following steps.

From the cluster’s navigation menu, select Topics.
Select your topic.
Click the Settings tab.
In the Lightning Table section, click Enable Lightning Table.
In the confirmation dialog, click Enable.

Enable a Lightning Table for a topic without a schema

A Lightning Table needs a schema for its topic. If the topic doesn’t have one, the Cloud Console prompts you to create one before it enables the Lightning Table. When you apply the schema, Confluent Cloud registers it with Schema Registry.

To enable a Lightning Table for a topic without a schema, complete the following steps.

From the cluster’s navigation menu, select Lightning Tables.
Click Add Lightning Table.

If the cluster doesn’t have any Lightning Tables yet, click Enable Lightning Table instead.

A dialog opens that lists the topics in your cluster.
Clear the Has schema checkbox.

The list now includes topics without a schema.
In the Lightning Table column for your topic, click Enable.
In the Create a topic schema before you enable the Lightning Table dialog, paste a sample JSON message or write your own schema.
For Format, select the schema format.
Click Continue.
In the confirmation dialog, click Enable.

View Lightning Tables

The Lightning Tables page lists the Lightning Tables in a cluster.

To view the Lightning Tables in a cluster, select Lightning Tables from the cluster’s navigation menu.

The Lightning Tables page shows the following columns for each Lightning Table:

Topic name: The topic that the Lightning Table is enabled for.
Lightning Table status: The current status of the Lightning Table. For more information, see View Lightning Table status.
Size: The present size of the Lightning Table.
Scanned bytes: The bytes scanned across all queries on the Lightning Table in the last 24 hours.
Preview: An icon that opens the Lightning Table for querying. For more information, see Query a Lightning Table in the Cloud Console.

To find a Lightning Table, enter a topic name in the Search topics box.

The Topics page also has a Lightning Tables column, which shows whether each topic has a Lightning Table. You might need to scroll right to see it.

Query a Lightning Table in the Cloud Console

You can query an active Lightning Table with SQL in the Cloud Console.

To query a Lightning Table, complete the following steps.

From the cluster’s navigation menu, select Lightning Tables.
In the Preview column for your Lightning Table, click the Query data icon.

The Preview Lightning Table pane opens.
On the SQL tab, edit the prefilled query to explore your data.
Click Run.

The results appear in the pane.
When you finish querying, close the pane.

Besides the SQL tab, the pane has the following tabs with sample code that you can copy:

API: A curl command that sends a POST request to query the Lightning Table.
MCP: An npx command that opens the MCP Inspector, so you can try the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for the Lightning Table.

Results from a Lightning Table query might differ from the results of an Apache Flink® streaming or snapshot query that you run in the SQL workspace. For how these query types compare, see What is a Lightning Table query.

For the SQL that a Lightning Table query supports, see SQL Reference for Lightning Table Queries in Confluent Cloud.

If you access the Lightning Table over a private network, you can’t run queries in the Cloud Console. Use the associated private endpoint for the API or MCP instead. For more information, see Private Networking for Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud.

View Lightning Table status

The Cloud Console shows a Lightning Table’s status in the following places:

The Lightning Table status column on the Lightning Tables page.
The Lightning Tables column on the Topics page.
The status badge on the topic page.
The Status field in the Lightning Table section of the topic’s Settings tab.

A Lightning Table can have the following statuses:

Status	Description
Pending	Confluent Cloud is validating the Lightning Table before setup.
Provisioning	Confluent Cloud is setting up resources for the Lightning Table.
Active	The Lightning Table is ready to query.
Unavailable	Queries are temporarily unavailable while Confluent Cloud restores the Lightning Table.
Failed	The Lightning Table can’t recover from an error. Fix the cause. Then disable the Lightning Table and enable it again.
Deleting	Confluent Cloud is deleting the Lightning Table. You can’t query it.

You can query a Lightning Table only when its status is Active.

If a topic doesn’t have a Lightning Table, the Status field on its Settings tab shows Off.

The Lightning Table section of the Settings tab also shows the following details:

Endpoint: The MCP endpoint for the Lightning Table.
Enabled on: When the Lightning Table was enabled.

Disable a Lightning Table

When you disable a Lightning Table, the topic data becomes unavailable to any applications that query the Lightning Table.

To disable a Lightning Table, complete the following steps.

From the cluster’s navigation menu, select Topics.
Select your topic.
Click the Settings tab.
In the Lightning Table section, click Disable Lightning Table.
In the confirmation dialog, click Disable.

When the Lightning Table is disabled, the Status field shows Off.