The Road Towards Debezium 2.0

[Gunnar Morling]

Hey all,

Debezium has come a long way since we announced the 1.0 release nearly two years ago [1]. New connectors were added, functionality of existing connectors was expanded, and the adoption of the project has grown significantly.

During that time, we have aimed at keeping any 1.x release backwards compatible, with a strong focus on avoiding any breaking changes to the change event format, configuration options, metrics, behaviours of the connectors etc. Overall, I think this has worked really well. But we are also realizing that specific choices proved to be not optimal, e.g. when it comes to the names of specific metadata topics, the column masking implementation, or e.g. similar, yet slightly varying configuration options across the different SMTs provided by Debezium.

To that end, I have logged issue DBZ-3899 in our tracker [2] for collecting input and information about what should go into a future Debezium 2.0 release. The idea is to explore which potential changes are breaking ones, decide on whether to do them, and in which form, and then to release a new major version containing these changes. Unlike other releases, this one would not be a simple drop-in replacement, but for instance it may be required to adjust consumers of the Debezium change event streams.

Apart from potential format and configuration improvements like the ones mentioned above, other candidate changes are moving to Java 11 as a baseline, dropping support for wal2json in the Postgres connector, and some others. Please see the logged issue for more details. Note that the idea is absolutely not to turn everything from left to right just for the sake of it, but to focus on sensible changes helping with consistency, correctness and maintainability of the project.

So if you have any input for this, please either reply to this thread, or put a comment to the Jira issue. Note there's no timeline defined for this yet, we're in an explorative phase at this point. But I think seeing Debezium 2.0 some time around middle of next year could be a realistic expectation.

Thanks a lot for any input and feedback on this,

--Gunnar

[1] https://debezium.io/blog/2019/12/18/debezium-1-0-0-final-released/

[2] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-3899