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Status

Current state:  Under Discussionaccepted

Discussion thread: here [Change the link from the KIP proposal email archive to your own email thread]
JIRA: here [Change the link from KAFKA-1 to your own ticket] 

Voting thread: here

JIRA:

Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

Describe the problems you are trying to solve.

Public Interfaces

Briefly list any new interfaces that will be introduced as part of this proposal or any existing interfaces that will be removed or changed. The purpose of this section is to concisely call out the public contract that will come along with this feature.

A public interface is any change to the following:

• Binary log format

• The network protocol and api behavior

• Any class in the public packages under clientsConfiguration, especially client configuration

  • org/apache/kafka/common/serialization

  • org/apache/kafka/common

  • org/apache/kafka/common/errors

  • org/apache/kafka/clients/producer

  • org/apache/kafka/clients/consumer (eventually, once stable)

• Monitoring

• Command line tools and arguments

• Anything else that will likely break existing users in some way when they upgrade

Proposed Changes

3.0 gives us the opportunity to make backward-incompatible changes. With that, now is a good time to change the default serde from `byte array` to `null`. This change will allow users to better catch serialization issues from the beginning, as it's likely that they need to be setting a default serde themselves or passing in a serde rather than relying on the byte array default. 

Public Interfaces

Within `StreamsConfig.java`, DEFAULT_KEY_SERDE_CLASS_CONFIG will default to null and DEFAULT_VALUE_SERDE_CLASS_CONFIG will default to null. That means that the following existing methods will return `null` if no default is set, whereas before they returned byte array key/value serde.

// Will return null if no default is set through configs
public Serde defaultKeySerde() {
}

// Will return null if no default is set through configs
 public Serde defaultValueSerde() {
}

Proposed Changes

Where the default key and value serde used to be a byte array, it will now be null. Instead of throwing Null Pointer Exceptions, we'll throw a Config Exception to remind the user that they need to set a serde through the default configs or pass one inDescribe the new thing you want to do in appropriate detail. This may be fairly extensive and have large subsections of its own. Or it may be a few sentences. Use judgement based on the scope of the change.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

• What impact (if any) will there be on existing users?
• If we are changing behavior how will we phase out the older behavior?
• If we need special migration tools, describe them here.
• When will we remove the existing behavior?

Rejected Alternatives

...

• Users who currently rely on the default serdes being a byte array will need to update their applications to manually set the default serdes to byte array before upgrading to 3.0

Rejected Alternatives