Integrate Oracle Database With Apache Kafka Using Debezium

Oracle Databases are used for traditional enterprise applications, cloud-native use cases, and departmental systems in large enterprises. Debezium connector for Oracle is a great way to capture data changes from the transactional system of record and make them available for use cases such as replication, data warehousing, and real-time analytics.  

What Is Debezium?

Debezium is an open source distributed streaming platform for change data capture (CDC) that provides Apache Kafka Connect connectors for several databases, including Oracle.

Applications use AMQ Streams to consume change events. Debezium uses the Apache Kafka Connect framework, which makes all of Debezium’s connectors into Kafka Connector source connectors. They can be deployed and managed using AMQ Streams’ Kafka Connect custom Kubernetes resources.

Change Data Capture

Change data capture, or CDC, is a well-established software design pattern for a system that monitors and captures the changes in data so that other software can respond to those changes. CDC captures row-level changes to database tables and passes corresponding change events to a data streaming bus.

The connector enables you to connect your database and consume updates from the stream of events generated by your data integration process. The events stream can propagate changes back into the source database or perform other operations on the data in real-time.

The connector provides transaction capture, including data and schema changes to Kafka topics. They can be consumed by data integration processes such as streaming ETL or replication tools.

Connector Capabilities

Debezium ingests change events using Oracle’s native LogMiner database package. Oracle LogMiner is part of the Oracle Database utilities and provides a well-defined, easy-to-use, and comprehensive interface for querying online and archived redo log files.

The first time the Debezium Oracle connector starts, it performs an initial consistent snapshot of the database to see its entire history. You can change this behavior by setting the snapshot.mode. After the connector completes its initial snapshot, the Debezium connector continues streaming from the position it reads from the current system change number (SCN) position in the redo log. The initial snapshot ensures that the connector has a complete and consistent data set.

The Debezium connector for Oracle Databases supports the following database versions:

• Oracle Database 12.2 EE
• Oracle Database 19.3 EE
• Oracle Database 21.3 EE

The Oracle connector used with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is in Technology Preview (TP) for this release.

In the following video, I describe a simple example of enabling the connectors to capture events from a containerized Oracle Database and then send those events to AMQ Streams running on an OpenShift cluster.

Check the complete supported configurations for more information.

Red Hat Application Foundations

The Debezium connector for Oracle databases is part of the supported components of Red Hat Application Foundations, an 100% open source initiative designed to help organizations modernize their applications with the latest technologies. The connector became General Available (GA) with the 1.9 release, and you can deploy it on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The connector enables users to easily connect their databases using a single tool: no need for separate development teams or IT teams managing dozens of different systems! This means you can focus on building great products instead of worrying about how they'll work together once deployed.

Conclusion

As we can see, change data capture is one of the tools used to bridge traditional data stores and new cloud-native event-driven architectures. The Debezium connector is now part of the Red Hat Application Foundations (RHAF) family and is available for use in your applications. The connector supports AMQ Streams, a high-performance, scalable distribution of Apache Kafka that allows applications to consume data from many sources as event streams. 

Get started by downloading the Red Hat Application Foundations Debezium CDC connectors from the Red Hat Developer.