Cassandra Sink Connector for Confluent Platform¶

The Kafka Connect Cassandra Sink Connector is a high-speed mechanism for writing data to Apache Cassandra and is compatible with Cassandra 2.1, 2.2, and 3.0.

Important

Cassandra Sink Connector version 2.0.0 is not backwards compatible with version 1.0.0, 1.1.0, and 1.2.0. See the Upgrading to version 2.0.x section for more information.

Install the Cassandra Connector¶

You can install this connector by using the instructions or you can manually download the ZIP file.

confluent-hub install confluentinc/kafka-connect-cassandra:latest

You can install a specific version by replacing latest with a version number. For example:

confluent-hub install confluentinc/kafka-connect-cassandra:2.0.0

Install the connector manually¶

Download and extract the ZIP file for your connector and then follow the manual connector installation instructions.

License¶

You can use this connector for a 30-day trial period without a license key.

After 30 days, this connector is available under a Confluent enterprise license. Confluent issues Confluent enterprise license keys to subscribers, along with providing enterprise-level support for Confluent Platform and your connectors. If you are a subscriber, please contact Confluent Support at support@confluent.io for more information.

See Confluent Platform license for license properties and Confluent License Properties for information about the license topic.

Configuration Properties¶

For a complete list of configuration properties for this connector, see Cassandra Sink Connector Configuration Properties.

Upgrading to version 2.0.x¶

Cassandra Sink connector version 2.0.x includes changes that do not allow backward compatibility with versions 1.0.x, 1.1.x, 1.2.x, and 1.3.x. Depending on your requirements, you can upgrade to the new version of the connector by taking one of the following paths:

If you don’t want to use SSL or Kerberos with the connector, you can configure the cassandra.local.datacenter property by completing the following steps:
1. Connect to one of your Cassandra nodes defined in cassandra.contact.points using the cqlsh tool.
2. Run the following CQL command:
```
SELECT data_center FROM system.local;
```
3. Use the value from running the previous CQL command to configure the cassandra.local.datacenter property.
  
  Note
  
  The cassandra.contact.points property no longer defaults to localhost, so if you’re using it in a local environment, explicitly set it.
If you want to use SSL:
1. Remove the cassandra.ssl.provider configuration.
2. Follow the first upgrade path. This shouldn’t have an impact on your SSL set up.
If you want to use Kerberos:
1. Ensure each of your Connect workers have a krb5.conf configured that can point to a KDC to provide tickets to access your Cassandra contact points.
2. Set up a user principal for your connector and grab its corresponding key tab file.
3. Configure cassandra.security to KERBEROS and configure connect.cassandra.principal and connect.cassandra.keytab.
  
  Note
  
  The cassandra.kerberos.sasl.protocol configuration property must match the service portion of your Cassandra service principal.
4. Follow the first or second upgrade path mentioned previously depending on your requirements.

To view the specific changes for the 2.0.x versions of the Cassandra Sink Connector, see the changelog.

Usage Notes¶

This connector uses the topic to determine the name of the table to write to. You can change this dynamically by using a transform like Regex Router to change the topic name.

Note

For an example of how to get Kafka Connect connected to Confluent Cloud, see Distributed Cluster.

Schema Management¶

You can configure this connector to manage the schema on the Cassandra cluster. When altering an existing table the key is ignored. This is to avoid the potential issues around changing a primary key on an existing table. The key schema is used to generate a primary key for the table when it is created. These fields must also be in the value schema. Data written to the table is always read from the value from Apache Kafka®. This connector uses the topic to determine the name of the table to write to. This can be changed on the fly by using a transform to change the topic name.

Time To Live (TTL) Support¶

This connector provides support for TTL by which data can be automatically expired after a specific period. TTL value is the time to live value for the data. After that particular amount of time, data will be automatically deleted. For example, if the TTL value is set to 100 seconds then data would be automatically deleted after 100 seconds. To use this feature you have to set cassandra.ttl config with time(in seconds) for which you want to retain the data. If you don’t specify this property then the record will be inserted with default TTL value null, meaning that written data will not expire.

Offset tracking Support in Kafka¶

This connector support two type of offset tracking support.

Offset stored in Cassandra Table

This is the default behaviour of the connector. Here, the offset is stored in the cassandra table.

Offset stored in Kafka

If you want that offset should be managed in kafka then you must specify cassandra.offset.storage.table.enable=false. By default, this property is true (in this case offset will be stored in Cassandra table).

Troubleshooting¶

If you encounter error messages like this:

Batch for [test.twitter] is of size 127.661KiB, exceeding specified threshold of 50.000KiB by 77.661KiB

Or warning messages like this:

Batch for [test.twitter] is of size 25.885KiB, exceeding specified threshold of 5.000KiB by 20.885KiB

Try adjusting the consumer.max.poll.records setting in the worker.properties for Kafka Connect.

Examples¶

Upsert mode¶

This example will configure the connector to use upserts when writing data to Cassandra.

Select one of the following configuration methods based on how you have deployed Kafka Connect. Distributed Mode will the JSON / REST examples. Standalone mode will use the properties based example.

Distributed Mode JSON

{
  "name" : "cassandraSinkConnector1",
  "config" : {
    "connector.class" : "io.confluent.connect.cassandra.CassandraSinkConnector",
    "tasks.max" : "1",
    "topics" : "topic1,topic2,topic3",
    "cassandra.contact.points" : "cassandra",
    "cassandra.keyspace" : "test",
    "cassandra.write.mode" : "Update"
  }
}

Standalone Mode Properties

connector.class=io.confluent.connect.cassandra.CassandraSinkConnector
tasks.max=1
topics=topic1,topic2,topic3
cassandra.contact.points=cassandra
cassandra.keyspace=test
cassandra.write.mode=Update

Standard¶

This example will connect to an Apache Cassandra instance without authentication.

Select one of the following configuration methods based on how you have deployed Kafka Connect. Distributed Mode will the JSON / REST examples. Standalone mode will use the properties based example.

Distributed Mode JSON

{
  "name" : "cassandraSinkConnector1",
  "config" : {
    "connector.class" : "io.confluent.connect.cassandra.CassandraSinkConnector",
    "tasks.max" : "1",
    "topics" : "topic1,topic2,topic3",
    "cassandra.contact.points" : "cassandra",
    "cassandra.keyspace" : "test"
  }
}

Standalone Mode Properties

connector.class=io.confluent.connect.cassandra.CassandraSinkConnector
tasks.max=1
topics=topic1,topic2,topic3
cassandra.contact.points=cassandra
cassandra.keyspace=test

SSL and Authentication¶

This example will connect to an Apache Cassandra instance with SSL and username/password authentication.

Select one of the following configuration methods based on how you have deployed Kafka Connect. Distributed mode will use the JSON/REST examples. Standalone mode will use the properties based example.

Distributed Mode JSON

{
  "name" : "cassandraSinkConnector1",
  "config" : {
    "connector.class": "io.confluent.connect.cassandra.CassandraSinkConnector",
    "tasks.max": "1",
    "topics": "topic1,topic2,topic3",
    "cassandra.contact.points": "cassandra",
    "cassandra.keyspace": "test",
    "cassandra.ssl.enabled": "true",
    "cassandra.security": "PASSWORD",
    "cassandra.username": "example",
    "cassandra.password": "password",
    "cassandra.ssl.truststore.password": "password",
    "cassandra.ssl.truststore.path": "path_to_keystore"
  }
}

Standalone Mode Properties

connector.class=io.confluent.connect.cassandra.CassandraSinkConnector
tasks.max=1
topics=topic1,topic2,topic3
cassandra.contact.points=cassandra
cassandra.keyspace=test
cassandra.security=PASSWORD
cassandra.username=example
cassandra.password=password
cassandra.ssl.enabled=true
cassandra.ssl.truststore.password=password
cassandra.ssl.truststore.path=path_to_keystore

Additional Documentation¶

CASSANDRA SINK CONNECTOR