Status

Current state: Under Discussion

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]

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

Motivation

Currently it is not possible to produce records with a null value when using the kafka-console-producer. The kafka-console-producer is an important debugging tool and this would allow producing tombstone records from the CLI rather than depending on external tools such as kcat.

Public Interfaces

ConsoleProducer will be updated to accept a new property: parse.value. It will default to "true" to keep the existing behavior. When set to "false", the record value will be set to null.

Example:

$ ./bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:29092 --topic test --property parse.value=false --property parse.key=true
>mykey<tab>

Where <tab> is a tabulation as it is the default key separator. This will result in a record with key=mykey and value=null.

Proposed Changes

Describe 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

If there are alternative ways of accomplishing the same thing, what were they? The purpose of this section is to motivate why the design is the way it is and not some other way.