Engineering Analytics
Engineering Analytics

How to load data from Kafka to Typesense

Learn how to use Airbyte to synchronize your Kafka data into Typesense within minutes.

TL;DR

This can be done by building a data pipeline manually, usually a Python script (you can leverage a tool as Apache Airflow for this). This process can take more than a full week of development. Or it can be done in minutes on Airbyte in three easy steps:

  1. set up Kafka as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
  2. set up Typesense as a destination connector
  3. define which data you want to transfer and how frequently

You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

This tutorial’s purpose is to show you how.

What is Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform that is used to handle real-time data feeds. It is designed to handle high volumes of data and provide real-time processing and analysis of data streams. Kafka is used by many companies for various purposes such as data integration, real-time analytics, and messaging. It is highly scalable and fault-tolerant, making it a popular choice for large-scale data processing. Kafka provides a publish-subscribe model where producers publish data to topics, and consumers subscribe to those topics to receive the data. It also provides features such as data retention, replication, and partitioning to ensure data reliability and availability.

What is Typesense

Typesense is an open-source, typo-tolerant search engine optimized for an instant (typically sub-50ms) search-like-up-type experience and developer productivity. If you've heard of Elasticsearch or Algolia, a good way to think about Typesense is that it's an open source alternative to Algolia, with some key issues fixed and an easy-to-use battery-powered alternative to Elasticsearch.It works like a CDN, but for Search. Deploy nodes around the world, closest to your users, to provide them an ultra-fast search experience.

Integrate Kafka with Typesense in minutes

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Prerequisites

  1. A Kafka account to transfer your customer data automatically from.
  2. A Typesense account.
  3. An active Airbyte Cloud account, or you can also choose to use Airbyte Open Source locally. You can follow the instructions to set up Airbyte on your system using docker-compose.

Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform that consolidates and streamlines the process of extracting and loading data from multiple data sources to data warehouses. It offers pre-built connectors, including Kafka and Typesense, for seamless data migration.

When using Airbyte to move data from Kafka to Typesense, it extracts data from Kafka using the source connector, converts it into a format Typesense can ingest using the provided schema, and then loads it into Typesense via the destination connector. This allows businesses to leverage their Kafka data for advanced analytics and insights within Typesense, simplifying the ETL process and saving significant time and resources.

Step 1: Set up Kafka as a source connector

1. First, you need to have a Kafka source connector that you want to connect to Airbyte. You can download the connector from the Apache Kafka website or any other reliable source.

2. Once you have the Kafka source connector, you need to configure it with the necessary settings such as the Kafka broker URL, topic name, and other relevant parameters.

3. Next, you need to create a new connection in Airbyte by clicking on the ""New Connection"" button on the dashboard.

4. Select the Kafka source connector from the list of available connectors and provide the necessary details such as the connector name, version, and configuration settings.

5. After providing the required details, click on the ""Test Connection"" button to ensure that the connection is established successfully.

6. If the connection is successful, you can proceed to create a new pipeline by clicking on the ""New Pipeline"" button on the dashboard.

7. Select the Kafka source connector as the source and choose the destination connector where you want to send the data.

8. Configure the pipeline settings such as the data mapping, transformation, and other relevant parameters.

9. Once you have configured the pipeline, click on the ""Run"" button to start the data transfer process.

10. Monitor the pipeline progress and ensure that the data is transferred successfully from the Kafka source connector to the destination connector.

Step 2: Set up Typesense as a destination connector

1. First, navigate to the Airbyte website and log in to your account.
2. Once you are logged in, click on the "Destinations" tab on the left-hand side of the screen.
3. Scroll down until you find the Typesense destination connector and click on it.
4. You will be prompted to enter your Typesense API key. Enter this information and click "Test Connection" to ensure that the connection is successful.
5. If the connection is successful, click "Save" to save your Typesense destination connector settings.
6. Next, navigate to the "Sources" tab on the left-hand side of the screen and select the source that you want to connect to your Typesense destination.
7. Follow the prompts to enter the necessary information for your source connector, such as the API key or database credentials.
8. Once you have entered all of the necessary information, click "Test Connection" to ensure that the connection is successful.
9. If the connection is successful, click "Save" to save your source connector settings.
10. Finally, click on the "Sync" tab on the left-hand side of the screen and select the source and destination connectors that you want to use for your data sync.
11. Follow the prompts to set up your data sync, such as selecting the tables or data types that you want to sync.
12. Once you have completed all of the necessary steps, click "Start Sync" to begin syncing your data between your source and Typesense destination connectors.

Step 3: Set up a connection to sync your Kafka data to Typesense

Once you've successfully connected Kafka as a data source and Typesense as a destination in Airbyte, you can set up a data pipeline between them with the following steps:

  1. Create a new connection: On the Airbyte dashboard, navigate to the 'Connections' tab and click the '+ New Connection' button.
  2. Choose your source: Select Kafka from the dropdown list of your configured sources.
  3. Select your destination: Choose Typesense from the dropdown list of your configured destinations.
  4. Configure your sync: Define the frequency of your data syncs based on your business needs. Airbyte allows both manual and automatic scheduling for your data refreshes.
  5. Select the data to sync: Choose the specific Kafka objects you want to import data from towards Typesense. You can sync all data or select specific tables and fields.
  6. Select the sync mode for your streams: Choose between full refreshes or incremental syncs (with deduplication if you want), and this for all streams or at the stream level. Incremental is only available for streams that have a primary cursor.
  7. Test your connection: Click the 'Test Connection' button to make sure that your setup works. If the connection test is successful, save your configuration.
  8. Start the sync: If the test passes, click 'Set Up Connection'. Airbyte will start moving data from Kafka to Typesense according to your settings.

Remember, Airbyte keeps your data in sync at the frequency you determine, ensuring your Typesense data warehouse is always up-to-date with your Kafka data.

Use Cases to transfer your Kafka data to Typesense

Integrating data from Kafka to Typesense provides several benefits. Here are a few use cases:

  1. Advanced Analytics: Typesense’s powerful data processing capabilities enable you to perform complex queries and data analysis on your Kafka data, extracting insights that wouldn't be possible within Kafka alone.
  2. Data Consolidation: If you're using multiple other sources along with Kafka, syncing to Typesense allows you to centralize your data for a holistic view of your operations, and to set up a change data capture process so you never have any discrepancies in your data again.
  3. Historical Data Analysis: Kafka has limits on historical data. Syncing data to Typesense allows for long-term data retention and analysis of historical trends over time.
  4. Data Security and Compliance: Typesense provides robust data security features. Syncing Kafka data to Typesense ensures your data is secured and allows for advanced data governance and compliance management.
  5. Scalability: Typesense can handle large volumes of data without affecting performance, providing an ideal solution for growing businesses with expanding Kafka data.
  6. Data Science and Machine Learning: By having Kafka data in Typesense, you can apply machine learning models to your data for predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and more.
  7. Reporting and Visualization: While Kafka provides reporting tools, data visualization tools like Tableau, PowerBI, Looker (Google Data Studio) can connect to Typesense, providing more advanced business intelligence options. If you have a Kafka table that needs to be converted to a Typesense table, Airbyte can do that automatically.

Wrapping Up

To summarize, this tutorial has shown you how to:

  1. Configure a Kafka account as an Airbyte data source connector.
  2. Configure Typesense as a data destination connector.
  3. Create an Airbyte data pipeline that will automatically be moving data directly from Kafka to Typesense after you set a schedule

With Airbyte, creating data pipelines take minutes, and the data integration possibilities are endless. Airbyte supports the largest catalog of API tools, databases, and files, among other sources. Airbyte's connectors are open-source, so you can add any custom objects to the connector, or even build a new connector from scratch without any local dev environment or any data engineer within 10 minutes with the no-code connector builder.

We look forward to seeing you make use of it! We invite you to join the conversation on our community Slack Channel, or sign up for our newsletter. You should also check out other Airbyte tutorials, and Airbyte’s content hub!

What should you do next?

Hope you enjoyed the reading. Here are the 3 ways we can help you in your data journey:

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Easily address your data movement needs with Airbyte Cloud
Take the first step towards extensible data movement infrastructure that will give a ton of time back to your data team. 
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Talk to a data infrastructure expert
Get a free consultation with an Airbyte expert to significantly improve your data movement infrastructure. 
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Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and get the community’s new enlightening content along with Airbyte’s progress in their mission to solve data integration once and for all.
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Connectors Used

What should you do next?

Hope you enjoyed the reading. Here are the 3 ways we can help you in your data journey:

flag icon
Easily address your data movement needs with Airbyte Cloud
Take the first step towards extensible data movement infrastructure that will give a ton of time back to your data team. 
Get started with Airbyte for free
high five icon
Talk to a data infrastructure expert
Get a free consultation with an Airbyte expert to significantly improve your data movement infrastructure. 
Talk to sales
stars sparkling
Improve your data infrastructure knowledge
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and get the community’s new enlightening content along with Airbyte’s progress in their mission to solve data integration once and for all.
Subscribe to newsletter

Connectors Used

Frequently Asked Questions

What data can you extract from Kafka?

Kafka's API gives access to various types of data, including:

1. Event data: Kafka is primarily used for streaming event data, such as user actions, sensor readings, and log data.

2. Metadata: Kafka provides metadata about the topics, partitions, and brokers in a cluster.

3. Consumer offsets: Kafka tracks the offset of each message consumed by a consumer, allowing for reliable message delivery.

4. Producer metrics: Kafka provides metrics on the performance of producers, such as message send rate and error rate.

5. Consumer metrics: Kafka provides metrics on the performance of consumers, such as message consumption rate and lag.

6. Log data: Kafka stores log data for a configurable amount of time, allowing for historical analysis and debugging.

7. Administrative data: Kafka provides APIs for managing topics, partitions, and consumer groups.

Overall, Kafka's API gives access to a wide range of data related to event streaming, metadata, performance metrics, and administrative tasks.

What data can you transfer to Typesense?

You can transfer a wide variety of data to Typesense. This usually includes structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data like transaction records, log files, JSON data, CSV files, and more, allowing robust, scalable data integration and analysis.

What are top ETL tools to transfer data from Kafka to Typesense?

The most prominent ETL tools to transfer data from Kafka to Typesense include:

  • Airbyte
  • Fivetran
  • Stitch
  • Matillion
  • Talend Data Integration

These tools help in extracting data from Kafka and various sources (APIs, databases, and more), transforming it efficiently, and loading it into Typesense and other databases, data warehouses and data lakes, enhancing data management capabilities.