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  • Heroku Streaming Data Connectors

Heroku Streaming Data Connectors

English — 日本語に切り替える

Last updated December 08, 2022

Table of Contents

  • Heroku App Setup
  • Heroku Add-ons Setup
  • Heroku’s Streaming Data Connector Setup
  • Managing a Connector
  • Destroying a Connector

This article describes how to configure Change Data Capture (CDC) for Heroku Postgres events and stream them to your Apache Kafka on Heroku add-on provisioned in a Private Space or a Shield Private Space. This process involves three high-level steps:

  1. Creating an app in Private Space or Shield Private Space.
  2. Provisioning a Private or Shield Heroku Postgres add-on and a Private or Shield Apache Kafka on Heroku add-on on your new app.
  3. Creating a streaming data connector to enable CDC events from your Postgres to your Kafka.

For more information about how to best configure a streaming data connector, see Best Practices for Heroku’s Streaming Data Connectors.

Heroku App Setup

To begin, create a Private or Shield Private Space. When your Space is available, you can create an app in your Space.

$ heroku spaces:create --region virginia --team my-team-name --space myspace
$ heroku spaces:wait --space myspace
$ heroku apps:create --space myspace my-cdc-app

Heroku Add-ons Setup

Next, you need two Private or Shield data add-ons attached to your app.

Your Postgres add-on must be version 10 or higher. Your Kafka add-on must be version 2.3 or higher.

$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:private-7 --as DATABASE --app my-cdc-app
$ heroku addons:create heroku-kafka:private-extended-2 --as KAFKA --app my-cdc-app

You can monitor the add-on provisioning progress:

$ heroku addons:wait --app my-cdc-app

When your add-ons are available, import your schema and/or data into your Postgres database.

Heroku’s Streaming Data Connector Setup

When you have a Private or Shield Private Space App with Heroku Postgres and Apache Kafka on Heroku add-ons configured, you can provision a connector.

First, install the CLI plugin:

$ heroku plugins:install @heroku-cli/plugin-data-connectors

To create a connector, you must gather several pieces of information.

  1. The name of the Kafka add-on
  2. The name of the Postgres add-on
  3. The name(s) of the Postgres tables from which you want to capture events
  4. (optionally) The name(s) of the columns you wish to exclude from capture events

In order to capture events in your Postgres database, a few requirements must be met:

  • The database encoding must be UTF-8
  • The table(s) must currently exist
  • The table(s) must have a primary key
  • The table(s) must not be partitioned
  • The table name(s) must only contain the characters [a-z,A-Z,0–9,\_]
  • The Kafka Formation must have direct Zookeeper access disabled

You want to take care in choosing what tables to capture. A single connector isn’t able to keep up with a high volume of events from many tables.

Next, you can create the connector. You need the names of your Postgres and Kafka add-ons, as well as a list of fully qualified tables you want to include in your database capture events:

$ heroku data:connectors:create \
    --source postgresql-neato-98765 \
    --store kafka-lovely-12345 \
    --table public.posts --table public.users

Provisioning can take approximately 15–20 minutes to complete. You can monitor the connector provisioning progress:

$ heroku data:connectors:wait gentle-connector-1234

When your connector is available, you can view the details including newly created Kafka topics:

$ heroku data:connectors:info gentle-connector-1234
=== Data Connector status for gentle_connector_1234
Name:   gentle_connector_1234
Status: available

=== Configuration
Table Name   Topic Name
public.posts gentle_connector_1234.public.posts
public.users gentle_connector_1234.public.users

Managing a Connector

After you’ve created your connector, there a few options available for managing it.

Pause or Resume

You can pause processing of new events. While a connector is paused, it stops polling for additional records until you resume it. Alternating between these two states is simple:

# to pause
$ heroku data:connectors:pause gentle-connector-1234

# to resume
$ heroku data:connectors:resume gentle-connector-1234

Under normal operation, the connector doesn’t lose change events that occur while a connector is paused. The connector uses a replication slot on the Postgres database to track progress, and picks up where it left off without losing data when resumed.

 

Don’t leave connectors in a “paused” state for more than a few hours. Paused connectors prevent WAL from being deleted, which can put the primary database at risk. It’s better to destroy the connector than to leave it paused for a long period.

 

Change events that occur while a connector is paused are not guaranteed to make it into Kafka. In the event of a failover (due to a system failure or a scheduled maintenance), change events after the connector was paused will be lost.

 

If the connector is paused for a very long time on a busy database, the replication slot prevents Postgres from deleting unread write-ahead logs (WAL). As a result, the WAL drive can fill up, which causes the database to shut down. Our automation generally detects these situations ahead of time, but in a worst-case scenario, we must drop the replication slot to protect the database. In that rare case, change events wouldn’t make it to Kafka.

Update Configuration

You can modify certain properties associated with your connector via the CLI. These properties include:

property possible values default value details
decimal.handling.mode precise, double, string precise docs
hstore.handling.mode map, json map docs
time.precision.mode adaptive, adaptive_time_microseconds, connect adaptive docs
interval.handling.mode numeric, string numeric docs
tombstones.on.delete true, false true docs
binary.handling.mode bytes, base64, hex bytes docs

For example, you can update the tombstones.on.delete to false:

$ heroku data:connectors:update gentle-connector-1234 \
  --setting tombstones.on.delete=false

It’s recommended that you familiarize yourself with our recommended Best Practices when working with connectors.

Configuration managed by Heroku

Most configuration properties are entirely managed by Heroku and are modified as needed.

property managed value details
heartbeat.interval.ms 60 seconds docs

Update Tables and Excluded Columns

You can also modify the connector’s Postgres tables, as well as excluded columns.

For example, you can add the table public.parcels and remove the table public.posts:

$ heroku data:connectors:update gentle-connector-1234 \
  --add-table public.parcels \
  --remove-table public.posts

New tables must adhere to the same requirements as outlined in the Setup.

Likewise, you can add and remove excluded columns:

$ heroku data:connectors:update gentle-connector-1234 \
  --exclude-column public.parcels.address \
  --remove-excluded-column public.posts.keys

Destroying a Connector

You can destroy a connector via the CLI.

This command does not destroy the Kafka topics used to produce events. You must manage their lifecycle independently.

$ heroku data:connectors:destroy gentle-connector-1234

Keep reading

  • Databases & Data Management

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PostgreSQL, libpq5.12.1, and Breaking Changes Impacting Connection Behavior PostgreSQL, libpq5.12.1, and Breaking Changes Impacting Connection Behavior

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