Kafka | Difference Between Idempotent And Transactional Producer
Context
During my deep dive into how we could use Kafka in ETG I started researching Exactly Once Semantics and Transactional API in Kafka. But while watching Video - Apache Kafka Transactions- Message Delivery and Exactly-Once Semantics I found out that I do not understand the difference between idempotancy and transactional semantics in kafka
Question
What is difference between idempotent and transactional producer in Kafka?
Answer
By enabling idempotence, the producer automatically sets
ackstoalland guarantees message delivery for the lifetime of the Producer instance.By enabling transactions, the producer automatically enables idempotence (and
acks=all). Transactions allow to group produce requests and offset commits and ensure all or nothing gets committed to Kafka.
Quote from Bing Chat
enable.idempotence=trueensures that each message is delivered exactly once, preventing duplicates due to producer retries. The transactional API, on the other hand, ensures that a group of messages across multiple partitions are all committed, or none of them are, providing atomicity.