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Enterprise changefeeds emit messages to configurable downstream sinks. This page details the URIs, parameters, and configurations available for each changefeed sink. CockroachDB supports the following sinks: The page provides detail on using the SQL statement and a complete list of the and options available when setting up a changefeed. For a step-by-step example connecting a changefeed to a sink, see the page.

Sink URI

The sink URI follows the basic format of:
URI ComponentDescription
schemeThe type of sink: kafka, gcpubsub, any cloud storage sink, or webhook sink.
hostThe sink’s hostname or IP address.
portThe sink’s port.
query_parametersThe sink’s .
You can create an external connection to represent a changefeed sink URI. This allows you to specify the external connection’s name in statements rather than the provider-specific URI. For detail on using external connections, see the page. To set a different sink URI to an existing changefeed, use the with ALTER CHANGEFEED.
Cockroach Labs recommends enabling Egress Perimeter Controls on CockroachDB Advanced clusters to mitigate the risk of data exfiltration when accessing external resources, such as cloud storage for change data capture or backup and restore operations. See for detail and setup instructions.

Kafka

Kafka sink connection

Example of a Kafka sink URI using SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication:
New in v23.1: Example of a Kafka sink URI using OAUTHBEARER authentication:
OAuth 2.0 authentication uses credentials managed by a third-party provider (IdP) to authenticate with Kafka instead of requiring you to provide your Kafka cluster credentials directly in a statement. Your provider’s authentication server will issue a temporary token, giving you flexibility to apply access rules on the credentials that your IdP provides. To authenticate to Kafka with OAuth using Okta, see the tutorial. and in CockroachDB Advanced clusters do not support connecting to a sink’s internal IP addresses for . To connect to a Kafka sink from CockroachDB Advanced, it is necessary to expose the Kafka cluster’s external IP address and open ports with firewall rules to allow access from a CockroachDB Advanced cluster. The following table lists the available parameters for Kafka URIs:
URI ParameterDescription
topic_nameThe topic name to which messages will be sent. See the following section on Topic Naming for detail on how topics are created.
topic_prefixAdds a prefix to all topic names.

For example, CREATE CHANGEFEED FOR TABLE foo INTO 'kafka://...?topic_prefix=bar_' would emit rows under the topic bar_foo instead of foo.
tls_enabledIf true, enable Transport Layer Security (TLS) on the connection to Kafka. This can be used with a ca_cert (see below).

Default: false
ca_certThe base64-encoded ca_cert file. Specify ca_cert for a Kafka sink.

Note: To encode your ca.cert, run base64 -w 0 ca.cert.
client_certThe base64-encoded Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) certificate. This is used with client_key.
client_keyThe base64-encoded private key for the PEM certificate. This is used with client_cert.

Note: Client keys are often encrypted. You will receive an error if you pass an encrypted client key in your changefeed statement. To decrypt the client key, run: openssl rsa -in key.pem -out key.decrypt.pem -passin pass:{PASSWORD}. Once decrypted, be sure to update your changefeed statement to use the new key.decrypt.pem file instead.
New in v23.1: sasl_client_idClient ID for OAuth authentication from a third-party provider. This parameter is only applicable with sasl_mechanism=OAUTHBEARER.
New in v23.1: sasl_client_secretClient secret for OAuth authentication from a third-party provider. This parameter is only applicable with sasl_mechanism=OAUTHBEARER. Note: You must base64 encode this value when passing it in as part of a sink URI.
sasl_enabledIf true, the authentication protocol can be set to SCRAM or PLAIN using the sasl_mechanism parameter. You must have tls_enabled set to true to use SASL.

Default: false
New in v23.1: sasl_grant_typeOverride the default OAuth client credentials grant type for other implementations. This parameter is only applicable with sasl_mechanism=OAUTHBEARER.
sasl_mechanismCan be set to OAUTHBEARER, SCRAM-SHA-256, SCRAM-SHA-512, or PLAIN. A sasl_user and sasl_password are required.

Default: PLAIN
New in v23.1: sasl_scopesA list of scopes that the OAuth token should have access for. This parameter is only applicable with sasl_mechanism=OAUTHBEARER.
New in v23.1: sasl_token_urlClient token URL for OAuth authentication from a third-party provider. This parameter is only applicable with sasl_mechanism=OAUTHBEARER. Note: You must URL encode this value before passing in a URI.
sasl_userYour SASL username.
sasl_passwordYour SASL password
insecure_tls_skip_verifyIf true, disable client-side validation of responses. Note that a CA certificate is still required; this parameter means that the client will not verify the certificate. Warning: Use this query parameter with caution, as it creates MITM vulnerabilities unless combined with another method of authentication.

Default: false
This table shows the parameters for changefeeds to a specific sink. The CREATE CHANGEFEED page provides a list of all the available .

Topic naming

By default, a Kafka topic has the same name as the table on which a changefeed was created. If you create a changefeed on multiple tables, the changefeed will write to multiple topics corresponding to those table names. When you run CREATE CHANGEFEED to a Kafka sink, the output will display the job ID as well as the topic name(s) that the changefeed will emit to. To modify the default topic naming, you can specify a , , or use the . Using the parameter, you can specify an arbitrary topic name and feed all tables into that topic. You can either manually create a topic in your Kafka cluster before starting the changefeed, or the topic will be automatically created when the changefeed connects to your Kafka cluster.
You must have the Kafka cluster setting auto.create.topics.enable set to true for automatic topic creation. This will create the topic when the changefeed sends its first message. If you create the consumer before that, you will also need the Kafka consumer configuration allow.auto.create.topics to be set to true.
Kafka has the following topic limitations:
  • Legal characters are numbers, letters, and [._-].
  • The maximum character length of a topic name is 249.
  • Topics with a period (.) and underscore (_) can collide on internal Kafka data structures, so you should use either but not both.
  • Characters not accepted by Kafka will be automatically encoded as unicode characters by CockroachDB.

Kafka sink configuration

The kafka_sink_config option allows configuration of a changefeed’s message delivery, Kafka server version, and batching parameters.
Each of the following settings have significant impact on a changefeed’s behavior, such as latency. For example, it is possible to configure batching parameters to be very high, which would negatively impact changefeed latency. As a result it would take a long time to see messages coming through to the sink. Also, large batches may be rejected by the Kafka server unless it’s separately configured to accept a high max.message.bytes.
"Flush"."MaxMessages" and "Flush"."Frequency" are configurable batching parameters depending on latency and throughput needs. For example, if "MaxMessages" is set to 1000 and "Frequency" to 1 second, it will flush to Kafka either after 1 second or after 1000 messages are batched, whichever comes first. It’s important to consider that if there are not many messages, then a "1s" frequency will add 1 second latency. However, if there is a larger influx of messages these will be flushed quicker. Using the default values or not setting fields in kafka_sink_config will mean that changefeed messages emit immediately. The configurable fields are as follows:
FieldTypeDescriptionDefault
Flush.MaxMessagesSets the maximum number of messages the producer can send in a single broker request. Any messages beyond the configured limit will be blocked. Increasing this value allows all messages to be sent in a batch.1000
Flush.MessagesConfigure the number of messages the changefeed should batch before flushing.0
Flush.BytesWhen the total byte size of all the messages in the batch reaches this amount, it should be flushed.0
Flush.FrequencyDuration stringWhen this amount of time has passed since the first received message in the batch without it flushing, it should be flushed."0s"
"Version"Sets the appropriate Kafka cluster version, which can be used to connect to Kafka versions < v1.0 (kafka_sink_config='{"Version": "0.8.2.0"}')."1.0.0.0"
"RequiredAcks"Specifies what a successful write to Kafka is. CockroachDB — this value defines the delivery. The possible values are:

"ONE": a write to Kafka is successful once the leader node has committed and acknowledged the write. Note that this has the potential risk of dropped messages; if the leader node acknowledges before replicating to a quorum of other Kafka nodes, but then fails.

"NONE": no Kafka brokers are required to acknowledge that they have committed the message. This will decrease latency and increase throughput, but comes at the cost of lower consistency.

"ALL": a quorum must be reached (that is, most Kafka brokers have committed the message) before the leader can acknowledge. This is the highest consistency level. You must also set acks to ALL in your server-side Kafka configuration for this to provide high durability delivery.
"ONE"
"Compression"Sets a compression protocol that the changefeed should use when emitting events. The possible values are: "NONE", "GZIP", "SNAPPY", "LZ4", "ZSTD"."NONE"

Kafka sink messages

The following shows the messages for a changefeed emitting to Kafka:
See the page and the tutorial for examples to set up a Kafka sink. For an overview of the messages emitted from changefeeds, see the page.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

This feature is in and subject to change. To share feedback and/or issues, contact Support.
Changefeeds can deliver messages to a Google Cloud Pub/Sub sink, which is integrated with Google Cloud Platform. New in v23.1: Enable the changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled to improve the throughput of changefeeds emitting to Pub/Sub sinks. Enabling this setting also alters the message format to use capitalized top-level fields in changefeeds emitting JSON-encoded messages. Therefore, you may need to reconfigure downstream systems to parse the new message format before enabling this setting:
For more details, refer to the Pub/Sub sink messages section. A Pub/Sub sink URI follows this example:
URI ParameterDescription
project nameThe Google Cloud Project name.
region(Optional) The single region to which all output will be sent. If you do not include region, then you must create your changefeed with the option.
topic_name(Optional) The topic name to which messages will be sent. See the following section on Topic Naming for detail on how topics are created.
AUTHThe authentication parameter can define either specified (default) or implicit authentication. To use specified authentication, pass your Service Account credentials with the URI. To use implicit authentication, configure these credentials via an environment variable. See for examples of each of these.
CREDENTIALS(Required with AUTH=specified) The base64-encoded credentials of your Google Service Account.
ASSUME_ROLEThe service account of the role to assume. Use in combination with AUTH=implicit or specified.
This table shows the parameters for changefeeds to a specific sink. The CREATE CHANGEFEED page provides a list of all the available . When using Pub/Sub as your downstream sink, consider the following:
  • Pub/Sub sinks support JSON message format. You can use the option in combination with for CSV-formatted messages.
  • Use the option for multi-region Pub/Sub. Google Cloud’s multi-region Pub/Sub will have lower latency when emitting from multiple regions, but Google Cloud Pub/Sub does not support message ordering for multi-region topics.
  • Changefeeds connecting to a Pub/Sub sink do not support the topic_prefix option.
Ensure one of the following Pub/Sub roles are set in your Google Service Account at the project level:
  • To create topics on changefeed creation, you must use the Pub/Sub Editor role, which contains the permissions to create a topic.
  • If the topic the changefeed is writing to already exists, then you can use the more limited Pub/Sub Publisher role, which can only write to existing topics.
For more information, read about compatible changefeed and the example.
You can use Google’s Pub/Sub emulator, which allows you to run Pub/Sub locally for testing. CockroachDB uses the Google Cloud SDK, which means that you can follow Google’s instructions for Setting environment variables to run the Pub/Sub emulator.

Pub/Sub topic naming

When running a CREATE CHANGEFEED statement to a Pub/Sub sink, consider the following regarding topic names:
  • Changefeeds will try to create a topic automatically. When you do not specify the topic in the URI with the parameter, the changefeed will use the table name to create the topic name.
  • If the topic already exists in your Pub/Sub sink, the changefeed will write to it.
  • Changefeeds watching multiple tables will write to multiple topics corresponding to those table names.
  • The option will create a topic using the fully qualified table name for each table the changefeed is watching.
  • The output from CREATE CHANGEFEED will display the job ID as well as the topic name(s) to which the changefeed will emit.
You can manually create a topic in your Pub/Sub sink before starting the changefeed. Refer to the example for more detail. To understand restrictions on user-specified topic names, refer to Google’s documentation on Guidelines to name a topic or subscription. For a list of compatible parameters and options, refer to on the CREATE CHANGEFEED page.

Pub/Sub sink configuration

You can configure flushing, retry, and concurrency behavior of changefeeds running to a Pub/Sub sink with the following:
  • If you have enabled changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled, set the to configure the number of concurrent workers used by changefeeds in the cluster when sending requests to a Pub/Sub sink. When you set changefeed.sink_io_workers, it will not affect running changefeeds; , set changefeed.sink_io_workers, and then . Setting changefeed.sink_io_workers will also affect changefeeds emitting to webhook sinks when changefeed.new_webhook_sink_enabled is set to true.
  • Set the pubsub_sink_config option to configure the changefeed flushing and retry behavior to your webhook sink. For details on the pubsub_sink_config option’s configurable fields, refer to the following table and examples.
FieldTypeDescriptionDefault
Flush.MessagesThe batch is flushed and its messages are sent when it contains this many messages.0
Flush.BytesThe batch is flushed when the total byte sizes of all its messages reaches this threshold.0
Flush.FrequencyWhen this amount of time has passed since the first received message in the batch without it flushing, it should be flushed."0s"
Retry.MaxThe maximum number of attempted batch emit retries after sending a message batch in a request fails. Specify either an integer greater than zero or the string inf to retry indefinitely. This only affects batch emit retries, not other causes of . Note that setting this field will not prevent the whole changefeed job from retrying indefinitely.3
Retry.BackoffHow long the sink waits before retrying after the first failure. The backoff will double until it reaches the maximum retry time of 30 seconds.

For example, if Retry.Max = 4 and Retry.Backoff = 10s, then the sink will try at most 4 retries, with 10s, 20s, 30s, and 30s backoff times.
"500ms"
For example:
Setting either Messages or Bytes with a non-zero value without setting Frequency will cause the sink to assume Frequency has an infinity value. If either Messages or Bytes have a non-zero value, then a non-zero value for Frequency must be provided. This configuration is invalid and will cause an error, since the messages could sit in a batch indefinitely if the other conditions do not trigger.
Some complexities to consider when setting Flush fields for batching:
  • When all batching parameters are zero ("Messages", "Bytes", and "Frequency") the sink will interpret this configuration as “send batch every time a message is available.” This would be the same as not providing any configuration at all:
  • If one or more fields are set as non-zero values, any fields with a zero value the sink will interpret as infinity. For example, in the following configuration, the sink will send a batch whenever the size reaches 100 messages, or, when 5 seconds has passed since the batch was populated with its first message. Bytes is unset, so the batch size is unlimited. No flush will be triggered due to batch size:

Pub/Sub sink messages

In CockroachDB v23.2 and later, changefeeds will have changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled enabled by default.
When the changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled cluster setting is enabled, changefeeds will have improved throughput and the changefeed JSON-encoded message format has top-level fields that are capitalized:
Before enabling changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled, you may need to reconfigure downstream systems to parse the new message format.
With changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled set to false, changefeeds emit JSON messages with the top-level fields all lowercase:
If changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled is set to false, changefeeds will not benefit from the improved throughput performance that this setting enables. The following shows the default JSON messages for a changefeed created with changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled set to false. These changefeed messages were emitted as part of the example:
For an overview of the messages emitted from changefeeds, see the page.

Cloud storage sink

Use a cloud storage sink to deliver changefeed data to OLAP or big data systems without requiring transport via Kafka. Some considerations when using cloud storage sinks:
  • Cloud storage sinks work with JSON and emit newline-delimited JSON files. You can use the option in combination with for CSV-formatted messages.
  • Cloud storage sinks can be configured to store emitted changefeed messages in one or more subdirectories organized by date. See file partitioning and the examples.
  • The supported cloud schemes are: s3, gs, azure, http, and https.
  • Both http:// and https:// are cloud storage sinks, not webhook sinks. It is necessary to prefix the scheme with webhook- for webhook sinks.
You can authenticate to cloud storage sinks using specified or implicit authentication. CockroachDB also supports assume role authentication for Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage, which allows you to limit the control specific users have over your storage buckets. For detail and instructions on authenticating to cloud storage sinks, see . Examples of supported cloud storage sink URIs:

Amazon S3

Azure Blob Storage

Google Cloud Storage

HTTP

Cloud storage parameters

The following table lists the available parameters for cloud storage sink URIs:
URI ParameterStorageDescription
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_IDAWSThe access key ID to your AWS account.
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEYAWSThe secret access key to your AWS account.
ASSUME_ROLEAWS S3, GCSThe ARN (AWS) or service account (GCS) of the role to assume. Use in combination with AUTH=implicit or specified.

AWS S3 only: Use external_id with ASSUME_ROLE to specify a third-party assigned external ID as part of the role. Refer to for setup details.
AUTHAWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, GCSThe authentication parameter can define either specified (default) or implicit authentication. To use specified authentication, pass your account credentials with the URI. To use implicit authentication, configure these credentials via an environment variable. See for examples of each of these.
AZURE_ACCOUNT_NAMEAzure Blob StorageThe name of your Azure account.
AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEYAzure Blob StorageThe URL-encoded account key for your Azure account.
AZURE_CLIENT_IDAzure Blob StorageApplication (client) ID for your App Registration.
AZURE_CLIENT_SECRETAzure Blob StorageClient credentials secret generated for your App Registration.
AZURE_ENVIRONMENTAzure Blob StorageThe Azure environment that the storage account belongs to. The accepted values are: AZURECHINACLOUD, AZUREGERMANCLOUD, AZUREPUBLICCLOUD, and AZUREUSGOVERNMENTCLOUD. These are cloud environments that meet security, compliance, and data privacy requirements for the respective instance of Azure cloud. If the parameter is not specified, it will default to AZUREPUBLICCLOUD.
AZURE_TENANT_IDAzure Blob StorageDirectory (tenant) ID for your App Registration.
CREDENTIALSGCS(Required with AUTH=specified) The base64-encoded credentials of your Google Service Account credentials.
file_sizeAllThe file will be flushed (i.e., written to the sink) when it exceeds the specified file size. This can be used with the , which flushes on a specified cadence.

Default: 16MB
partition_formatAllSpecify how changefeed are partitioned in cloud storage sinks. Use partition_format with the following values:
  • daily is the default behavior that organizes directories by dates (2022-05-18/, 2022-05-19/, etc.).
  • hourly will further organize directories by hour within each date directory (2022-05-18/06, 2022-05-18/07, etc.).
  • flat will not partition the files at all.
For example: CREATE CHANGEFEED FOR TABLE users INTO 'gs://...?AUTH...&partition_format=hourly'

Default: daily
For example: CREATE CHANGEFEED FOR TABLE users INTO 'gs://...?AUTH...&partition_format=hourly'

Default: daily S3_STORAGE_CLASS | AWS S3 | Specify the S3 storage class for files created by the changefeed. See for the available classes and an example.

Default: STANDARD topic_prefix | All | Adds a prefix to all topic names.

For example, CREATE CHANGEFEED FOR TABLE foo INTO 's3://...?topic_prefix=bar_' would emit rows under the topic bar_foo instead of foo.
This table shows the parameters for changefeeds to a specific sink. The CREATE CHANGEFEED page provides a list of all the available . provides more detail on authentication to cloud storage sinks.

Cloud storage sink messages

The following shows the default JSON messages for a changefeed emitting to a cloud storage sink:
For an overview of the messages emitted from changefeeds, see the page.

Webhook sink

New in v23.1: Enable the changefeed.new_webhook_sink_enabled to improve the throughput of changefeeds emitting to webhook sinks. .
Use a webhook sink to deliver changefeed messages to an arbitrary HTTP endpoint. Example of a webhook sink URL:
The following table lists the parameters you can use in your webhook URI:
URI ParameterDescription
ca_certThe base64-encoded ca_cert file. Specify ca_cert for a webhook sink.

Note: To encode your ca.cert, run base64 -w 0 ca.cert.
client_certThe base64-encoded Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) certificate. This is used with client_key.
client_keyThe base64-encoded private key for the PEM certificate. This is used with client_cert.

Note: Client keys are often encrypted. You will receive an error if you pass an encrypted client key in your changefeed statement. To decrypt the client key, run: openssl rsa -in key.pem -out key.decrypt.pem -passin pass:{PASSWORD}. Once decrypted, be sure to update your changefeed statement to use the new key.decrypt.pem file instead.
insecure_tls_skip_verifyIf true, disable client-side validation of responses. Note that a CA certificate is still required; this parameter means that the client will not verify the certificate. Warning: Use this query parameter with caution, as it creates MITM vulnerabilities unless combined with another method of authentication.

Default: false
This table shows the parameters for changefeeds to a specific sink. The CREATE CHANGEFEED page provides a list of all the available . The following are considerations when using the webhook sink:
  • Only supports HTTPS. Use the parameter when testing to disable certificate verification; however, this still requires HTTPS and certificates.
  • Supports JSON output format. You can use the option in combination with for CSV-formatted messages.

Webhook sink configuration

You can configure flushing, retry, and concurrency behavior of changefeeds running to a webhook sink with the following:
  • If you have enabled changefeed.new_webhook_sink_enabled, set the to configure the number of concurrent workers used by changefeeds in the cluster when sending requests to a webhook sink. When you set changefeed.sink_io_workers, it will not affect running changefeeds; , set changefeed.sink_io_workers, and then . Setting changefeed.sink_io_workers will also affect changefeeds emitting to Google Cloud Pub/Sub sinks when changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled is set to true.
  • Set the webhook_sink_config option to configure the changefeed flushing and retry behavior to your webhook sink. For details on the webhook_sink_config option’s configurable fields, refer to the following table and examples.
FieldTypeDescriptionDefault
Flush.MessagesThe batch is flushed and its messages are sent when it contains this many messages.0
Flush.BytesThe batch is flushed when the total byte sizes of all its messages reaches this threshold.0
Flush.FrequencyWhen this amount of time has passed since the first received message in the batch without it flushing, it should be flushed."0s"
Retry.MaxThe maximum number of attempted HTTP retries after sending a message batch in an HTTP request fails. Specify either an integer greater than zero or the string inf to retry indefinitely. This only affects HTTP retries, not other causes of . Note that setting this field will not prevent the changefeed from retrying indefinitely.3
Retry.BackoffHow long the sink waits before retrying after the first failure. The backoff will double until it reaches the maximum retry time of 30 seconds.

For example, if Retry.Max = 4 and Retry.Backoff = 10s, then the sink will try at most 4 retries, with 10s, 20s, 30s, and 30s backoff times.
"500ms"
For example:
Setting either Messages or Bytes with a non-zero value without setting Frequency will cause the sink to assume Frequency has an infinity value. If either Messages or Bytes have a non-zero value, then a non-zero value for Frequency must be provided. This configuration is invalid and will cause an error, since the messages could sit in a batch indefinitely if the other conditions do not trigger. Some complexities to consider when setting Flush fields for batching:
  • When all batching parameters are zero ("Messages", "Bytes", and "Frequency") the sink will interpret this configuration as “send batch every time a message is available.” This would be the same as not providing any configuration at all:
  • If one or more fields are set as non-zero values, any fields with a zero value the sink will interpret as infinity. For example, in the following configuration, the sink will send a batch whenever the size reaches 100 messages, or, when 5 seconds has passed since the batch was populated with its first message. Bytes is unset, so the batch size is unlimited. No flush will be triggered due to batch size:

Webhook sink messages

The following shows the default JSON messages for a changefeed emitting to a webhook sink. These changefeed messages were emitted as part of the example:
For an overview of the messages emitted from changefeeds, see the page.

See also