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I want to know difference about kafka option Importnace level. There is 3 levels in Apache kafka.

org.apache.kafka.commong.config.ConfigDef.Importance

public enum Importance {
    HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW
}

What's the difference between these three?

Anderson Choi
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1 Answers1

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This enumeration is used as indicator of the Kafka community to provide some guidance for the user on the many configurations. You will see them in the description of the configurations.

There is no concrete definition for it. For each use case the importance may vary.

If it is "high" it is usually a mandatory configuration and the user should definitely have the knowledge what it means. Anyway, in most cases the default values should be sufficient for most applications.

Configurations marked as "low" are in most applications not required to be considered by the user unless they really want to tweak some low-level behavior.

In KAFKA-4094 it is described as:

The importance label is meant to help people navigate this in a sane way. The intention is something like the following:

HIGH - things you must think about and set

MEDIUM - things you don't necessarily need to set but that you might want to tune

LOW - thing you probably don't need to set

To conclude, there is no hard rule on the importance, it just gives a user an indication on how much they need to think about an individual configuration. However, this categorization does not fit all users and their use cases.

Michael Heil
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