Github user tzulitai commented on a diff in the pull request:
https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/2509#discussion_r101050554
--- Diff: docs/dev/connectors/kafka.md ---
@@ -161,6 +161,46 @@ For convenience, Flink provides the following schemas:
The KeyValue objectNode contains a "key" and "value" field which
contain all fields, as well as
an optional "metadata" field that exposes the offset/partition/topic
for this message.
+#### Kafka Consumers Start Position Configuration
+
+By default, the Flink Kafka Consumer starts reading partitions from the
consumer group's (`group.id` setting in the
+consumer properties) committed offsets in Kafka brokers (or Zookeeper for
Kafka 0.8).
+
+This behaviour can be explicitly overriden, as demonstrated below:
+
+<div class="codetabs" markdown="1">
+<div data-lang="java" markdown="1">
+{% highlight java %}
+final StreamExecutionEnvironment env =
StreamExecutionEnvironment.getExecutionEnvironment();
+
+FlinkKafkaConsumer08<String> myConsumer = new FlinkKafkaConsumer08<>(...);
+myConsumer.setStartFromEarliest(); // start from the earliest record
possible
+myConsumer.setStartFromLatest(); // start from the latest record
+myConsumer.setStartFromGroupOffsets(); // the default behaviour
--- End diff --
Yes. If the consumer group does not contain offsets for a partition, the
"auto.offset.reset" property is used for that partition. I think this is the
behaviour of Kafka's high level consumer.
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