Sink URI
The sink URI follows the basic format of:| URI Component | Description |
|---|---|
scheme | The type of sink: kafka, gcpubsub, any cloud storage sink, or webhook sink. |
host | The sink’s hostname or IP address. |
port | The sink’s port. |
query_parameters | The sink’s . |
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 usingSCRAM-SHA-256 authentication:
OAUTHBEARER authentication:
| URI Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
topic_name | The topic name to which messages will be sent. See the following section on Topic Naming for detail on how topics are created. |
topic_prefix | Adds 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_enabled | If true, enable Transport Layer Security (TLS) on the connection to Kafka. This can be used with a ca_cert (see below). Default: false |
ca_cert | The 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_cert | The base64-encoded Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) certificate. This is used with client_key. |
client_key | The 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_id | Client ID for OAuth authentication from a third-party provider. This parameter is only applicable with sasl_mechanism=OAUTHBEARER. |
New in v23.1: sasl_client_secret | Client 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_enabled | If 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_type | Override the default OAuth client credentials grant type for other implementations. This parameter is only applicable with sasl_mechanism=OAUTHBEARER. |
sasl_mechanism | Can 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_scopes | A 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_url | Client 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_user | Your SASL username. |
sasl_password | Your SASL password |
insecure_tls_skip_verify | If 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 |
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 runCREATE 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.- 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
Thekafka_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:
| Field | Type | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
Flush.MaxMessages | Sets 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.Messages | Configure the number of messages the changefeed should batch before flushing. | 0 | |
Flush.Bytes | When the total byte size of all the messages in the batch reaches this amount, it should be flushed. | 0 | |
Flush.Frequency | Duration string | When 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:Google Cloud Pub/Sub
This feature is in and subject to change. To share feedback and/or issues, contact Support.
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:
| URI Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
project name | The 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. |
AUTH | The 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_ROLE | The service account of the role to assume. Use in combination with AUTH=implicit or specified. |
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
JSONmessage 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_prefixoption.
- 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.
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 aCREATE 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 CHANGEFEEDwill display the job ID as well as the topic name(s) to which the changefeed will emit.
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 setchangefeed.sink_io_workers, it will not affect running changefeeds; , setchangefeed.sink_io_workers, and then . Settingchangefeed.sink_io_workerswill also affect changefeeds emitting to webhook sinks whenchangefeed.new_webhook_sink_enabledis set totrue. - Set the
pubsub_sink_configoption to configure the changefeed flushing and retry behavior to your webhook sink. For details on thepubsub_sink_configoption’s configurable fields, refer to the following table and examples.
| Field | Type | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
Flush.Messages | The batch is flushed and its messages are sent when it contains this many messages. | 0 | |
Flush.Bytes | The batch is flushed when the total byte sizes of all its messages reaches this threshold. | 0 | |
Flush.Frequency | When this amount of time has passed since the first received message in the batch without it flushing, it should be flushed. | "0s" | |
Retry.Max | The 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.Backoff | How 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" |
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.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.
Bytesis 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.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.changefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabled set to false, changefeeds emit JSON messages with the top-level fields all lowercase:
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:
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
JSONand emit newline-delimitedJSONfiles. 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, andhttps. - Both
http://andhttps://are cloud storage sinks, not webhook sinks. It is necessary to prefix the scheme withwebhook-for webhook sinks.
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 Parameter | Storage | Description |
|---|---|---|
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID | AWS | The access key ID to your AWS account. |
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY | AWS | The secret access key to your AWS account. |
ASSUME_ROLE | AWS S3, GCS | The 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. |
AUTH | AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, GCS | The 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_NAME | Azure Blob Storage | The name of your Azure account. |
AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY | Azure Blob Storage | The URL-encoded account key for your Azure account. |
AZURE_CLIENT_ID | Azure Blob Storage | Application (client) ID for your App Registration. |
AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET | Azure Blob Storage | Client credentials secret generated for your App Registration. |
AZURE_ENVIRONMENT | Azure Blob Storage | The 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_ID | Azure Blob Storage | Directory (tenant) ID for your App Registration. |
CREDENTIALS | GCS | (Required with AUTH=specified) The base64-encoded credentials of your Google Service Account credentials. |
file_size | All | The 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_format | All | Specify how changefeed are partitioned in cloud storage sinks. Use partition_format with the following values:
CREATE CHANGEFEED FOR TABLE users INTO 'gs://...?AUTH...&partition_format=hourly' Default: daily |
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:Webhook sink
New in v23.1: Enable the
changefeed.new_webhook_sink_enabled to improve the throughput of changefeeds emitting to webhook sinks. .| URI Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
ca_cert | The 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_cert | The base64-encoded Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) certificate. This is used with client_key. |
client_key | The 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_verify | If 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 |
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 setchangefeed.sink_io_workers, it will not affect running changefeeds; , setchangefeed.sink_io_workers, and then . Settingchangefeed.sink_io_workerswill also affect changefeeds emitting to Google Cloud Pub/Sub sinks whenchangefeed.new_pubsub_sink_enabledis set totrue. - Set the
webhook_sink_configoption to configure the changefeed flushing and retry behavior to your webhook sink. For details on thewebhook_sink_configoption’s configurable fields, refer to the following table and examples.
| Field | Type | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
Flush.Messages | The batch is flushed and its messages are sent when it contains this many messages. | 0 | |
Flush.Bytes | The batch is flushed when the total byte sizes of all its messages reaches this threshold. | 0 | |
Flush.Frequency | When this amount of time has passed since the first received message in the batch without it flushing, it should be flushed. | "0s" | |
Retry.Max | The 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.Backoff | How 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" |
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.
Bytesis unset, so the batch size is unlimited. No flush will be triggered due to batch size:

