Apache AVRO Data Format

Introduction

Apache AVRO was added as an inbound data format in Cinchy v5.3.

Apache AVRO (inbound) is a data format with added integration with the Kafka Schema Registry, which helps enforce data governance within a Kafka architecture.

Avro is an open source data serialization system that helps with data exchange between systems, programming languages, and processing frameworks. Avro stores both the data definition and the data together in one message or file. Avro stores the data definition in JSON format making it easy to read and interpret; the data itself is stored in binary format making it compact and efficient.

Some of the benefits for using AVRO as a data format are:

• It is compact

• It has a direct mapping to/from JSON

• It's fast

• It has bindings for a wide variety of programming languages.

For more about AVRO and Kafka, read the documentation here.

Setting up the Connection to a Kafka Schema Registry

To set up the Apache AVRO connection to a Kafka Schema Registry, you will need to configure your Listener Configs table with the below specified attributes.

Listener Config Attributes

Topic Column

Name	Description
"topicName"	Mandatory. This is the Kafka topic name to listen messages on.
"messageFormat"	Put "AVRO" if your messages are serialized in AVRO

{ 
"topicName": "sampleavro", 
"messageFormat": "AVRO" 
}

Connections Attributes Column

Name	Description
"bootstrapServers"	Mandatory. List the Kafka bootstrap servers in a comma-separated list. Should be in the form of host:port
"url"	This is required if your data follows a schema when serialized in AVRO. It is a comma-separated list of URLs for schema registry instances that are used to register or lookup schemas.
"basicAuthCredentialsSource"	Specifies the Kafka configuration property "schema.registry.basic.auth.credentials.source" that provides the basic authentication credentials. This can be "UserInfo" | "SaslInherit"
"basicAuthUserInfo"	Basic Auth credentials specified in the form of username:password
"sslKeystorePassword"	The client keystore (PKCS#12) password

{
  "bootstrapServers": "host:port",
  "schemaRegistrySettings": {
    "url": "URL"
    "basicAuthCredentialsSource": "UserInfo" | "SaslInherit",
    "basicAuthUserInfo": "username:password",
    "sslKeystorePassword": "password"
  }
}