Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform. Browse topics, inspect messages with JSON auto-expansion, monitor consumer groups, and produce messages.

Overview

Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform capable of handling trillions of events a day. Key characteristics include:

  • High-throughput messaging: Process millions of events per second with low latency
  • Durability and reliability: Persistent message storage with configurable replication
  • Horizontal scalability: Scale across brokers and partitions
  • Stream processing: Built-in support for real-time stream processing
  • Ordering guarantees: Per-partition message ordering

Kafka is ideal for event-driven architectures, data pipelines, log aggregation, and real-time analytics.

Connecting

To connect to Apache Kafka in DBCode:

  1. Open the DBCode Extension: Launch Visual Studio Code and open the DBCode extension.
  2. Add a New Connection: Click on the “Add Connection” icon.
  3. Complete connection form: Select Apache Kafka as the database type and enter:
    • Bootstrap broker host and port (default: 9092)
    • Authentication method (No Auth, SASL/PLAIN, SCRAM-SHA-256, SCRAM-SHA-512)
    • SSL/TLS configuration if required
  4. Connect: Click save to connect to your Kafka cluster.
  5. Start Browsing: Navigate topics, view messages, and monitor consumer groups.

For detailed instructions, refer to the Connect article.

Kafka Features in DBCode

DBCode enhances your Kafka development experience with:

  • Topic browsing: Navigate topics with partition counts and expand for column details
  • Message inspection: View messages with automatic JSON field expansion into columns
  • Consumer group monitoring: Track consumer groups and their protocol types
  • Message producing: Insert messages via the standard DBCode grid interface
  • Topic management: Create and drop topics directly from the explorer

For more information about Kafka, visit kafka.apache.org.