Hi, A user of the Debezium CDC Kafka Connect connectors has asked whether we could provide information about the original source type of captured table columns.
Usually the type info we provide by using the Kafka Connect types and some custom semantic types is good enough. But there are some cases where additional type info would help: e.g. in case of MySQL, MEDIUMINT and INT columns are transmitted as Connect Int32 (as that's the smallest type which covers their value range). But from that, a consumer can't tell wether an INT or MEDIUMINT column should be created in a downstream database. Now my question is: would it be a reasonable thing for us to encode the original column type as an additional parameter of the Kafka Connect schemas (using a special parameter name), or would this be bending the concept of schema parameters too much? Admittedly, this metadata would be kind of source-specific, but I can see how it'd be beneficial in some use cases. Thanks for any advice, --Gunnar
