FYI: Kafka's new Java producer (which ships with Kafka) the behavior is as follows: If no partition is explicitly specified (to send the message to) AND the key is null, then the DefaultPartitioner [1] will assign messages to topic partitions in a round-robin fashion. See the javadoc and also the little bit of code in [1] for details.
Not sure which Go client you're using exactly so I can't tell whether your Go client follows the behavior of Kafka's Java producer. -Michael [1] https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/clients/src/main/java/org/apache/kafka/clients/producer/internals/DefaultPartitioner.java On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 7:53 AM, Ali Akhtar <ali.rac...@gmail.com> wrote: > If keys are null, what happens in terms of partitioning, is the load spread > evenly..? > > On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 7:59 AM, Gwen Shapira <g...@confluent.io> wrote: > > > Kafka itself supports null keys. I'm not sure about the Go client you > > use, but Confluent's Go client also supports null keys > > (https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go/). > > > > If you decide to generate keys and you want even spread, a random > > number generator is probably your best bet. > > > > Gwen > > > > On Sun, Oct 9, 2016 at 6:05 PM, Ali Akhtar <ali.rac...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > A kafka producer written elsewhere that I'm using, which uses the Go > > kafka > > > driver, is sending messages where the key is null. > > > > > > Is this OK - or will this cause issues due to partitioning not > happening > > > correctly? > > > > > > What would be a good way to generate keys in this case, to ensure even > > > partition spread? > > > > > > Thanks. > > > > > > > > -- > > Gwen Shapira > > Product Manager | Confluent > > 650.450.2760 | @gwenshap > > Follow us: Twitter | blog > > >
