I’m working with a MS SQL Server Debezium V2 source connector, and I’m still iterating through configuring the connector to the eventual state I’ll need it to be in. To do this, I find myself wanting to ‘restart’ the source connector from the beginning of the source DB’s CDC feed so that I can re-read all of the data in the test DB and make sure that the change I last made does what I need it to do.
I don’t see any obvious ‘restart’ function in the Kafka Connect web UI. What I’ve landed on is changing the topic prefix (foo, foo1, foo2, foo3, etc) and, later, dropping that same prefix with an SMT. That seems to do what I need it to do, but I can’t imagine that this is the sort of change I ought to make to do this. I think deleting the source connector and recreating it is an option, but it takes a good bit longer to do that. Long enough that I’ll eat the cost of this ‘strangeness’ and save deleting the source connector for when I’m ready to create the ‘real’ one that will target the actual DB.
What is the most typical, straightforward way for restarting a source connector from the ‘beginning’ of the CDC feed?