Page History

Current state: Under Discussion Merged

Voting thread: here

Discussion thread: here

JIRA:

...

Kafka Streams enforces a strict non-null-key policy in the DSL across all key-dependent operations (like aggregations and joins).
For left-joins, it makes sense to still accept a `null`, and add the left-hand record with an empty right-hand-side to the result.
Similarly, for outer-joins it makes sense to keep the record.
The defined semantics for left/outer join are: keep the stream record if no matching join record was found.
Thus, Kstreams Kafka Streams today's behavior is inconsistent with the defined semantics.

...

• left join Kstream-Kstream: no longer drop left records with null-key and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right value.
• outer join Kstream-Kstream: no longer drop left/right records with null-key and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right/left value.
• left-foreign-key join Ktable-Ktable: no longer drop left records with null-foreign-key returned by the ForeignKeyExtractor and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right value.
• left join KStream-Ktable: no longer drop left records with null-key and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right value.
• left join KStream-GlobalTable: no longer drop records when KeyValueMapper returns 'null' and call ValueJoiner with 'null' for right value.

...

We will hint to the DSL users via Java docs that they have now have the option to distinguish between the following scenarios within a KTable-KTable foreign- key-left-join operator:
"null-key" v.s. "not-null-key but null-value" by passing a 'ValueJoinerWithKey' instead of 'ValueJoiner' to the left join operator.
The remark will be made in the Java docs of all left join methods with a 'ValueJoiner' as a parameter.

...