Using Debezium

Debezium works with Materialize in two capacities:

• Debezium adds change data capture (CDC) to MySQL or PostgreSQL databases, which lets you propagate data from your database to Materialize
• Debezium’s CDC data (known as its envelope) is formatted in a way that expresses arbitrary operations (e.g. updates and deletes) on the database’s data. This envelope is a powerful feature that lets Materialize perform more complex analysis by understanding how upstream data is changing.

For the best experience using Debezium, we recommend following the guidelines outlined here.

PostgreSQL settings

Materialize relies on Debezium’s CDC envelope (which expresses changes to data) to understand all CRUD-like operations happening in the upstream database.

For Debezium to emit the envelope Materialize expects when using PostgreSQL, the tables which you’re performing CDC on must have the parameter REPLICA IDENTITY FULL set.

For example:

ALTER TABLE foo
REPLICA IDENTITY FULL;

Kafka-less setup

Users who wish to connect a database to Materialize without having to use Kafka can do so with tb. tb is a tool built by Materialize that lets you send Debezium data to Materialize using Avro OCF files, bypassing the need for Kafka. For more information and instructions, see tb’s GitHub page.