Lightning Tables for Topics in Confluent Cloud
A Lightning Table makes the data in an Apache Kafka® topic available for low-latency SQL queries. When you enable a Lightning Table for a topic, Confluent Cloud continuously ingests new data so that the Lightning Table reflects the latest state. You query it in the Confluent Cloud Console, through an HTTP API, with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client, with the Confluent CLI, or with a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) client, without consuming from the topic directly.
To enable a Lightning Table for a topic, you need the following:
A Basic, Standard, Enterprise, or Dedicated cluster on AWS in a supported region.
A registered schema (Avro, Protobuf, or JSON Schema) on the topic.
At minimum, the
CloudClusterAdminrole.
For complete instructions on enabling, disabling, and managing Lightning Tables, see the Lightning Tables documentation.
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