BIGINT UNSIGNED columns from MySQL databases have been represented using Kafka Connect’s Decimal type until now. This type allows to represent all possible values of such columns, but its based on a byte array, so it can be a bit cumbersome to handle for consumers. Therefore we added a new option named bigint.unsigned.handling.mode to the MySQL connector that allows to represent such columns using long.

For the very most cases that’s the preferable option, only if your column contains values larger than 2^63 (which MySQL doesn’t recommend due to potential value losses when performing calculations), you should stick to the Decimal representation.

Using long will be the default as of Debezium 0.7, for the 0.6.x timeline we decided to go with the previous behavior (i.e. using Decimal) for the sake of backwards compatibility.

Thanks a lot to Ben Williams who contributed this feature!

In the Debezium examples repository we now provide Docker Compose files which let you run the tutorial with all the three databases we currently support, MySQL, Postgres and MongoDB.

Just choose the Compose file for your preferred database and get a all the required components (ZooKeeper, Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect and the database) running within a few seconds.

We’ve also deployed Docker images for Postgres and MongoDB to the Debezium organization on Docker Hub, so you got some data to play with.

We’ve upgraded our images from Kafka 0.11.0.0 to 0.11.0.1. Also the binlog client library used by the MySQL connector was upgraded from 0.9.0 to 0.13.0.

Finally, several bugs were fixed in 0.6.1. E.g. you can now name a column column in MySQL (DBZ-408), generated DROP TEMP TABLE statements won’t flood the DB history topic (DBZ-295) and we’ve fixed a case where the Postgres connector would stop working due to an internal error but fail to report though via the task/connector status (DBZ-380).

Please see the full change log for more details and the complete list of fixed issues.

The work on Debezium 0.7 has already begun and we’ve merged the first set of changes. You can expect to see support for using the wal2json logical decoding plug-in with the Postgres connector, which will finally allow it to use Debezium with Postgres on Amazon RDS! We’ve also started our explorations of providing a connector for Oracle (DBZ-20) and hope to report some progress here soon.

While the work on Debezium 0.7 continues, you will likely continue to see one or more 0.6.x bugfix releases. We’ve automated the release process as much as possible, making it a breeze to ship a new release and getting fixes into your hands quickly.

If you’d like to contribute, please let us know. We’re happy about any help and will work with you to get you started quickly. Check out the details below on how to get in touch.