Even if you have transaction support, the same problem exists. If the client died before receiving the ack, it's not sure whether the broker really committed the data or not.
To address this issue, the client can save the offset of committed messages periodically. On restart from a crash, it first reads all messages after the last saved offset. It then knows whether the last message is committed or not and can decide whether the message should be resent or not. This probably only works for a single producer. Thanks, Jun On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 6:31 PM, Philip O'Toole <phi...@loggly.com> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 06:19:04PM -0700, Neha Narkhede wrote: > > The closest concept of transaction on the publisher side, that I can > > think of, is using batch of messages in a single call to the > > synchronous producer. > > > > Precisely, you can configure a Kafka producer to use the "sync" mode > > and batch messages that require transactional guarantees in a > > single send() call. That will ensure that either all the messages in > > the batch are sent or none. > > This is an interesting feature -- something I wasn't aware of. Still it > doesn't solve the problem *completely*. As many people realise, it's still > possible for the batch of messages to get into Kafka fine, but the ack from > Kafka to be lost on its way back to the Producer. In that case the Producer > erroneously believes the messages didn't get in, and might re-send them. > > You guys *haven't* solved that issue, right? I believe you write about it > on > the Kafka site. > > > > > Thanks, > > Neha > > > > On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Tom Brown <tombrow...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Is there an accepted, or recommended way to make writes to a Kafka > > > queue idempotent, or within a transaction? > > > > > > I can configure my system such that each queue has exactly one > producer. > > > > > > (If there are no accepted/recommended ways, I have a few ideas I would > > > like to propose. I would also be willing to implement them if needed) > > > > > > Thanks in advance! > > > > > > --Tom > > -- > Philip O'Toole > > Senior Developer > Loggly, Inc. > San Francisco, Calif. > www.loggly.com > > Come join us! > http://loggly.com/company/careers/ >