Docs: Document Kafka Connect control topic purpose and retention#16576
Open
wombatu-kun wants to merge 1 commit into
Open
Docs: Document Kafka Connect control topic purpose and retention#16576wombatu-kun wants to merge 1 commit into
wombatu-kun wants to merge 1 commit into
Conversation
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Summary
Users have reported confusion about the Kafka Connect sink's control topic growing without bound (#15844, #15844). The docs explain how to create the control topic but never describe what it is for, how its events are used, or that it should have a finite retention — so on brokers with a large or unlimited default
retention.ms, the topic accumulates coordination events indefinitely. This documents the behavior and the recommended configuration.What changed
Expanded the "Control topic" section of
docs/docs/kafka-connect.md:StartCommit/DataWritten/DataComplete/CommitToTable/CommitComplete), noting thatDataWrittencarries data/delete file metadata rather than rows, and that the durable commit position lives in the table snapshot — so control-topic events are transient.--config retention.ms=3600000to the topic-creation example.retention.msrelative to the commit interval/timeout, how to set it on an existing topic, multi-connector sizing, and usingcleanup.policy=deleterather than compaction.Closes #15844