Set Up MySQL CDC with Debezium and Redpanda

This example demonstrates how to use Debezium to capture the changes made to MySQL in real time and stream them to Redpanda.

This ready-to-run Docker Compose setup contains the following containers:

  • mysql container with the pandashop database, containing a single table, orders

  • debezium container capturing changes made to the orders table in real time.

  • redpanda container to ingest change data streams produced by debezium

For more information about the pandashop database schema, see the /data/mysql_bootstrap.sql file.

Example architecture

Prerequisites

You must have Docker and Docker Compose installed on your host machine.

Run the lab

  1. Download the following Docker Compose file on your local file system.

    Reveal the Docker Compose file
    docker-compose.yml
    version: '3.7'
    name: redpanda-cdc-mysql
    volumes:
      redpanda: null
    services:
      mysql:
          image: mysql/mysql-server:8.0.27
          hostname: mysql
          container_name: mysql
          ports:
            - 3306:3306
          environment:
            - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=debezium
            - MYSQL_USER=mysqluser
            - MYSQL_PASSWORD=mysqlpw
          volumes:
            - ./data/mysql.cnf:/etc/mysql/conf.d
            - ./data/mysql_bootstrap.sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/mysql_bootstrap.sql
      redpanda:
        image: docker.redpanda.com/redpandadata/redpanda:v23.3.13
        container_name: redpanda
        command:
          - redpanda start
          # Mode dev-container uses well-known configuration properties for development in containers.
          - --mode dev-container
          # Tells Seastar (the framework Redpanda uses under the hood) to use 1 core on the system.
          - --smp 1
          - --kafka-addr internal://0.0.0.0:9092,external://0.0.0.0:19092
          # Address the broker advertises to clients that connect to the Kafka API.
          # Use the internal addresses to connect to the Redpanda brokers
          # from inside the same Docker network.
          # Use the external addresses to connect to the Redpanda brokers
          # from outside the Docker network.
          - --advertise-kafka-addr internal://redpanda:9092,external://localhost:19092
          - --pandaproxy-addr internal://0.0.0.0:8082,external://0.0.0.0:18082
          # Address the broker advertises to clients that connect to the HTTP Proxy.
          - --advertise-pandaproxy-addr internal://redpanda:8082,external://localhost:18082
          - --schema-registry-addr internal://0.0.0.0:8081,external://0.0.0.0:18081
          # Redpanda brokers use the RPC API to communicate with each other internally.
          - --rpc-addr redpanda:33145
          - --advertise-rpc-addr redpanda:33145
        ports:
          - 18081:18081
          - 18082:18082
          - 19092:19092
          - 19644:9644
        volumes:
          - redpanda:/var/lib/redpanda/data
        healthcheck:
          test: ["CMD-SHELL", "rpk cluster health | grep -E 'Healthy:.+true' || exit 1"]
          interval: 15s
          timeout: 3s
          retries: 5
          start_period: 5s
      debezium:
        image: debezium/connect:2.4
        container_name: debezium
        environment:
          BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS: redpanda:9092
          GROUP_ID: 1
          CONFIG_STORAGE_TOPIC: connect_configs
          OFFSET_STORAGE_TOPIC: connect_offsets
        depends_on: [mysql, redpanda]
        ports:
          - 8083:8083
  2. Set the REDPANDA_VERSION environment variable to the version of Redpanda that you want to run. For all available versions, see the GitHub releases.

    For example:

    export REDPANDA_VERSION=23.3.13
  3. Run the following in the directory where you saved the Docker Compose file:

    docker compose up -d

    When the mysql container starts, the /data/mysql_bootstrap.sql file creates the pandashop database and the orders table, followed by seeding the ` orders` table with a few records.

  4. Log into MySQL:

    docker compose exec mysql mysql -u mysqluser -p

    Provide mysqlpw as the password when prompted.

  5. Check the content inside the orders table:

    use pandashop;
    show tables;
    select * from orders;

    This is your source table.

  6. Exit MySQL:

    exit
  7. While Debezium is up and running, create a source connector configuration to extract change data feeds from MySQL.

    docker compose exec debezium curl -i -X POST -H "Accept:application/json" -H "Content-Type:application/json" localhost:8083/connectors/ -d '
     {
      "name": "mysql-connector",
      "config": {
        "connector.class": "io.debezium.connector.mysql.MySqlConnector",
        "tasks.max": "1",
        "database.hostname": "mysql",
        "database.port": "3306",
        "database.user": "debezium",
        "database.password": "dbz",
        "database.server.id": "184054",
        "topic.prefix": "dbz",
        "database.include.list": "pandashop",
        "schema.history.internal.kafka.bootstrap.servers": "redpanda:9092",
        "schema.history.internal.kafka.topic": "schemahistory.pandashop"
      }
    }'

    You should see the following in the output:

    HTTP/1.1 201 Created
    Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2024 16:37:09 GMT
    Location: http://localhost:8083/connectors/mysql-connector
    Content-Type: application/json
    Content-Length: 489
    Server: Jetty(9.4.51.v20230217)

    The database.* configurations specify the connectivity details to mysql container. The parameter, schema.history.internal.kafka.bootstrap.servers points to the redpanda broker the connector uses to write and recover DDL statements to the database schema history topic.

  8. Wait a minute or two until the connector gets deployed inside Debezium and creates the initial snapshot of change log topics in Redpanda.

  9. Check the list of change log topics in redpanda by running:

    docker compose exec redpanda rpk topic list

    The output should contain two topics with the prefix dbz.* specified in the connector configuration. The topic dbz.pandashop.orders holds the initial snapshot of change log events streamed from orders table.

    NAME                     PARTITIONS  REPLICAS
    connect-status           5           1
    connect_configs          1           1
    connect_offsets          25          1
    dbz                      1           1
    dbz.pandashop.orders     1           1
    schemahistory.pandashop  1           1
  10. Monitor for change events by consuming the dbz.pandashop.orders topic:

    docker compose exec redpanda rpk topic consume dbz.pandashop.orders
  11. While the consumer is running, open another terminal to insert a record to the orders table.

    export REDPANDA_VERSION=23.3.13
    docker compose exec mysql mysql -u mysqluser -p

    Provide mysqlpw as the password when prompted.

  12. Insert the following record:

    use pandashop;
    INSERT INTO orders (customer_id, total) values (5, 500);

This will trigger a change event in Debezium, immediately publishing it to dbz.pandashop.orders Redpanda topic, causing the consumer to display a new event in the console. That proves the end-to-end functionality of your CDC pipeline.

Clean up

To shut down and delete the containers along with all your cluster data:

docker compose down -v

Next steps

Now that you have change log events ingested into Redpanda. You process change log events to enable use cases such as:

  • Database replication

  • Stream processing applications

  • Streaming ETL pipelines

  • Update caches

  • Event-driven Microservices