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IBM Data and AI Ideas Portal for Customers


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against products and services offered by the IBM Data & AI organization. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:


Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,


Post your ideas

Post ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted and upvote them if they matter to you,

  1. Post an idea

  2. Upvote ideas that matter most to you

  3. Get feedback from the IBM team to refine your idea


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

IBM Employees should enter Ideas at https://ideas.ibm.com


Status Not under consideration
Workspace DataStage
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 7, 2018

IIS IDR Integration via KAFKA

DataStage:
Kafka Connector in Information Server 11.7 does not support the use of schema registry or Avro JSON serialisation/deserialisation. IIDR (CDC) for Kafka on the other hand, produces Avro JSON serialised records into topics as default. Using Avro and schema registry have advantages for high volume and near-real-time integration use cases. At present, those benefits cannot be realised using IIS 11.7 Kafka Connector. More importantly, it does not support the default behaviour of IIDR for Kafka. This disadvantages the solutions and DataStage against competing technologies such as Talend which offers much superior support for Apache Kafka.

On other main issue using Kafka Connector in IIS 11.7 to consume data produced by IIDR for Kafka is the inability of Kafka Connector to handling NULL records. For physical deletes in a source, IIDR produces a NULL record at which point the DataStage job aborts.


CDC for Kafka:
On the IIDR (CDC) for Kafka side, there should be some flexibility for developer to select a output format and serialisation method without forcing down the Avro JSON path. For example, being able to produce string serialised or byte array serialised CSV records into topics.
Avro JSON requires a schema registry and it is not a generic Kafka SerDes (Serializer/Deserialiser). Although IBM has provided some user exits (KCOP - Kafka Customer Operation Processors) as a way around to this and produce records without a schema registry, using KCOP adds a processing overhead, since the producer first generates the record in Avro and then converts back by the KCOP to the desired format. In addition, only one KCOP can be used in a subscription and developer need to write custom KCOPs to combine any two or more non-standard CDC functions.