Data replication is essential to ensure data consistency, faster data access, and disaster recovery in cases of system failure or data loss.
One of the efficient ways to replicate data is the Change Data Capture (CDC) technique, which records only changes made to your datasets since the last capture. It reduces downtime and facilitates real-time updation of your destination databases.
Airbyte and Debezium are two key players in data replication and CDC.
This article provides a detailed Airbyte vs Debezium comparison to help you make an informed choice for your data replication needs.
Airbyte Overview
Airbyte is an efficient data integration platform that allows you to consolidate and transfer data from different sources to a centralized destination. It offers a collection of 350+ connectors that enable the building of reliable ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) data pipelines.
Airbyte offers flexibility for your varied integration requirements. You can deploy this open-spource integration tool on local systems or in the cloud.
An added advantage is Airbyte’s capability to manage AI data workflows. This allows you to directly load unstructured data into specialized vector destinations like Pinecone.
To secure data transfers, Airbyte offers features like SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, single sign-on (SSO), and role-based access control.
After loading the data into its destination, you can transform it by integrating Airbyte with dbt. This transformed data is useful for detailed analysis and business intelligence applications.
Debezium Overview
Debezium is an open-source distributed Change Data Capture (CDC) tool. You can deploy it directly on your databases to capture and stream changes from the source to the destination data systems in real time.
Debezium is built on Apache Kafka and uses Kafka Connect for reliable CDC and data streaming purposes.
The Kafka-based architecture enables you to achieve real-time data synchronization, facilitating constant updation of all your datasets for smooth data pipeline operations. As a result, Debezium contributes to accurate data analysis and faster insight generation, which can drive enterprise growth.
Debezium’s efficient CDC capabilities reduce unnecessary data movement, leading to less resource and time consumption. This contributes to improved operational efficiency and cost optimization.
Airbyte vs Debezium: CDC Showdown
Here is a detailed comparison of Airbyte vs Debezium for data replication through Change Data Capture (CDC):
Architecture (Airbyte's ELT approach vs Debezium's CDC)
Airbyte:
Airbyte is an ELT solution that provides a simple UI, API for configuration, job scheduling, logging, and alerting features. It also includes connectors that facilitate data transfer from many sources and destinations.
A component called a worker connects to source connectors, extracts data, and transfers it to the destination.
Airbyte’s UI allows you to send API requests for server or configuration management during the ELT process. These components help store critical information like credentials and replication frequency.
Debezium:
Debezium, an effective CDC solution, allows you to capture all changes in source datasets with minimal latency. This helps maintain real-time synchronization between source and destination.
Debezium is built on Apache Kafka Connect and offers fewer connectors than Airbyte. However, you can use these connectors to ingest row-level changes from various databases and publish them as events to Kafka topics.
Destination applications can then consume these events to synchronize changes made at the source with their datasets.
Data Integration Methods
Airbyte:
With a versatile architecture, Airbyte facilitates highly effective data integration across various platforms. It supports an extensive library of connectors. If the connector you want is not in the existing connector set, you can also create one using Airbyte’s Connector Development Kit (CDK).
You can set up the source connector to extract data from files stored locally or in cloud environments. This ingested data can then be loaded to the desired destination and transformed using the dbt framework.
Airbyte also offers PyAirbyte, a Python library, which offers utilities to use Airbyte connectors in Python. This is especially useful when it isn’t possible or desirable to set up an Airyte server or cloud account.
Debezium:
Debezium supports connection with various database sources to capture real-time changes. It only captures the newly made changes and efficiently syncs them to the destination via Kafka Connect.
With selective data capture, Debezium ensures minimal latency in data synchronization. This makes it an ideal choice for real-time data integration.
Ease of Use and Setup
Airbyte:
You can directly deploy the cloud version of Airbyte. An alternative is a self-managed version using the Airbyte Command Line Tool, which helps you install and run Airbyte to efficiently replicate your data from source to destination.
For troubleshooting, you can leverage its robust community support, which consists of a GitHub forum, help center, and community Slack channel. You can also access Airbyte tutorials on online learning platforms for a comprehensive understanding of its functionality.
Debezium:
Debezium setup requires the prior installation of Zookeeper, Kafka, and Kafka Connect for optimal use of its connectors. If these are not installed, you can configure the connection by specifying the plugin path in the Kafka Connect worker configuration. For more information, refer to the Debezium installation documentation.
After completing the setup, you can easily use a connector by creating a configuration file and employing Kafka Connect REST API to add connector configuration to your Kafka Connect cluster. The main interface of Debezium displays a list of all the available connectors to which you can connect.
Integrations
Airbyte:
Airbyte offers a library of 350+ pre-built connectors for data integration. It enables you to establish seamless connections with various data sources, such as tables, databases, and data warehouses.
These connectors support data replication, with some connectors also supporting CDC. You can also integrate Airbyte’s data connectors with analytics and BI tools to gain data-driven insights and make informed decisions.
Debezium:
Debezium integrates directly with a limited set of connectors, which are mainly databases.
As one of the best CDC tools, Debezium can be effectively combined with other data management tools to enhance data replication and synchronization. This flexibility allows you to integrate Debezium into varied data architectures, making it a suitable choice for real-time data operations.
Scalability
Airbyte:
Airbyte can accommodate increased data volumes by ensuring that the Docker containers or Kubernetes pods running your workflows are operating with sufficient execution resources. The worker is the main component that performs all the platform operations, such as data discovery, reading, and writing.
Data synchronization, one of Airbyte’s primary functionalities, requires two workers: one to read from the source and the other to write to the destination. To scale the data-syncing process, you must manage the memory and disk space capacity.
The source worker plays a significant role in memory usage, reading up to 10,000 records at a time. This results in high memory usage when reading large datasets.
For example, a table with an average row size of 0.5MB will require 0.5 * 10000 / 1000 = 5GB of RAM. All the source database connectors in Airbyte are Java connectors; you can leverage Java’s container memory feature that uses only 1/4th of the host’s total memory.
The size of connector images and the duration of sync processes can also take up disk space, impacting scalability. As a best practice, you should allocate at least 30GB of disk space per node. You may also opt to overprovision to accommodate increasing data volumes.
Debezium:
Built on Kakfa, Debezium benefits from its distributed architecture, which spreads the workload across clusters. This ensures that all the connectors continually function even in case of discrepancies, making Debezium highly scalable and fault-tolerant.
However, certain connectors like PostgreSQL might encounter scalability issues due to out-of-memory exceptions or limitations in handling large table snapshots.
Pricing Models
Airbyte:
Airbyte offers an open-source edition that is free. If you need enhanced features and support, Airbyte Cloud and the enterprise edition are available.
Airbyte Cloud provides a 14-day free trial, which includes 400 free credits, helping new users evaluate the platform’s features before opting for the paid version.
Debezium:
Debezium is completely open-source, allowing free usage for all its capabilities, including its low-latency data change capture. This makes it a great choice if you’re looking to implement change data capture without incurring additional costs.
Here is the tabular summary of the Debezium vs Airbyte comparison:
