# Connectors in ksqlDB for Confluent Platform ksqlDB manages and integrates with Kafka Connect, the open source Apache Kafka® component for loading and exporting data between Kafka and external systems. Use ksqlDB to: - Create connectors - Describe connectors - Import topics created by Connect to ksqlDB ![Illustration of the ksqlDB architecture showing embedded Kafka connectors](ksqldb/images/ksqldb-connectors.png) ## API reference - [CREATE CONNECTOR](../developer-guide/ksqldb-reference/create-connector.md#ksqldb-reference-create-connector) - [DESCRIBE CONNECTOR](../developer-guide/ksqldb-reference/describe-connector.md#ksqldb-reference-describe-connector) - [DROP CONNECTOR](../developer-guide/ksqldb-reference/drop-connector.md#ksqldb-reference-drop-connector) - [SHOW CONNECTORS](../developer-guide/ksqldb-reference/show-connectors.md#ksqldb-reference-show-connectors) ## Setup Connect integration There are two ways to deploy the ksqlDB-Connect integration: 1. **External**: If a Connect cluster is available, set the `ksql.connect.url` property in your ksqlDB Server configuration file. The default value for this is `http://localhost:8083`. 2. **Embedded**: ksqlDB can double as a Connect server and [distributed mode](/kafka-connectors/self-managed/userguide.html#distributed-mode) will run a cluster co-located on the ksqlDB server instance. To do this, supply a connect properties configuration file to the server and specify this file in the `ksql.connect.worker.config` property. #### NOTE For environments that need to share connect clusters and provide predictable workloads, running Connect externally is the recommended deployment option. ### Plugins ksqlDB doesn’t ship with connectors pre-installed, so you must download and install connectors. A good way to install connectors is by using [Confluent Marketplace](https://www.confluent.io/hub/). ## Natively supported connectors While it is possible to create, describe and list connectors of all types, ksqlDB supports a few connectors natively. ksqlDB provides templates to ease creation of connectors and custom code to explore topics created by these connectors into ksqlDB: - [Kafka Connect JDBC Connector (Source and Sink)](https://docs.confluent.io/kafka-connectors/jdbc/current/index.html): because the JDBC connector doesn’t populate the key automatically for the Kafka messages that it produces, ksqlDB supplies the ability to pass in `"key"=''` in the `WITH` clause to extract a column from the value and make it the key.