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Presentation

Keep your Metadata Repository Current with Event-Driven Updates using CDC and Kafka Connect

« Kafka Summit 2020

The data science techniques and machine learning models that provide the greatest business value and insights require data that spans enterprise silos. To integrate this data, and ensure you’re joining on the right fields, you need a comprehensive, enterprise-wide metadata repository. More importantly, you need it to be always up to date. Nightly updates are simply not good enough when customers and users expect near-real-time responsiveness. The challenge with keeping a metadata repository up to date lies not with cloud services or distributed storage frameworks, but rather with the relational database management systems (RDBMSs) that dot the enterprise landscape. At Comcast, we’ve found it relatively easy to feed our Apache Atlas metadata repo incrementally from Hadoop and AWS, using event-driven pushes to a dedicated Apache Kafka topic that Atlas listens to. Such pushes are not practical with RDBMSs, however, since the event-driven technique there is the database trigger. Triggers are so invasive and potentially detrimental to performance that your DB admin likely won’t allow one for detecting metadata changes. Triggers are out. Pulling the complete current state of metadata from a RDBMS at regular intervals and calculating the deltas is too slow and unworkable. And, it turns out that out-of-the-box log-based change data capture (CDC) is also dead-end because metadata changes are represented in transaction logs as SQL DDL strings, not as atomic insert/update/delete operations as for data. So, how do you keep your metadata repository always up to date with the current state of your RDBMS metadata? Our group solved this challenge by creating an alternate method for CDC on RDBMS metadata based on database system tables. Our query-based CDC serves as a Kafka Connect source for our Apache Atlas sink, providing event-driven, continuous updates to RDBMS metadata in our repository, but does not suffer from the usual limitations/disadvantages of vanilla query-based CDC. If you’re facing a similar challenge, join us at this session to learn more about the obstacles you’ll likely face and how you can overcome them using the method we implemented. Screen reader support enabled.

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