Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud
A Lightning Table makes the data in an Apache Kafka® topic available for low-latency SQL queries. You enable a Lightning Table for a topic, and then you query it with SQL in the Confluent Cloud Console, through an HTTP API, or with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client.
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.
How Lightning Tables work
When you enable a Lightning Table for a topic, Confluent Cloud materializes the topic data into a table that’s optimized for fast lookups. Confluent Cloud updates the Lightning Table within 100 milliseconds of new data arriving in the topic.
Lightning Tables are fully managed. You don’t need to provision infrastructure, write Kafka consumers, or manage Apache Flink® jobs.
Confluent Cloud uses append mode or upsert mode, based on the topic’s
cleanup.policy configuration. In upsert mode, the Lightning Table
keeps only the latest record for each key. For more information, see
Upsert mode.
Ways to query a Lightning Table
You query a Lightning Table with SQL through any of the following interfaces:
Cloud Console: Run a query in the Preview Lightning Table pane. For more information, see Query a Lightning Table in the Cloud Console.
API: Send a query to the API in a POST request. The API tab of the Preview Lightning Table pane generates a sample request for your Lightning Table.
MCP: Connect an MCP client, such as Claude Code, to query the Lightning Table with MCP tools. For more information, see Query Data from the Real-Time Context Engine in Confluent Cloud.
You can’t run queries in the Cloud Console over a private network. Instead, use the API or MCP with a private endpoint. For more information, see Private Networking for Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud.
To learn more about Lightning Table queries, see Lightning Table Queries in Confluent Cloud. For the SQL that a Lightning Table query supports, see SQL Reference for Lightning Table Queries in Confluent Cloud.