Confluent and Spring schema registry for kafka

Question

I'm settings up a schema registry server for kafka. I've used confluent schema registry and all was well but then I saw, that you can with less hassle set up a default, spring one. So I did but I was a bit surprised, it seems harder to control the schema, it does weird things with naming (EntityCamelCase to entitycamelcase), no separation for x-value and x-key as confluent did. Version of schema are bumped automatically and I don't even know what the compatibility mode is set.

So I wanted to find out something more but I really can't find anything about this spring schema registry server. There seem to be no properties to set available, nothing really.

https://docs.spring.io/spring-cloud-stream/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#_schema_registry_server

I tried to find out something in documentation but it doesn't seem to help either.

So, the question that I have and I can't find an answer to, what are the differences between confluent and spring schema registry server. Is there any source online to read about latter?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The schema registry server uses a relational database to store the schemas.

So, this is extra infrastructure, I don't know if I would consider that "less hassle"

By default, it uses an embedded database

Having the embedded one kinda defeats the purpose of having a Registry - you cannot share your schemas with external consumers, and when your app restarts, the embedded registry stops as well, which would cause your schema versions to change inconsistently over time.

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That's the immeadiate differences, but looking at the API calls, think it just stores schemas by version. There is no "compatibility checking"