Tuesday, October 20, 2015

JAVA 8 : Lambdas tutorial

Lambdas are the biggest addition to JAVA in not just release 8 but several releases. But when you look at the cryptic lambda syntax, like most regular programmers, you are left wondering why one should write code this way. 6. The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce lambdas, so that you can start using them in real code.

Overview

Lambdas facilitate defining, storing and passing as parameters blocks of code. They may be stored in variables for later use or passed as parameters to methods who may invoke the code. This style of programming is known as functional programming.

You might argue that JAVA already supported functional programming using anonymous classes. But that approach is considered verbose.

Example

Listing 1 shows the old way to pass executable code to a thread.

  public void Listing1_oldWayRunnable() {
        Runnable r = new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                System.out.println("Hello Anonymous") ;
            }
        } ;
        Thread t = new Thread(r) ;
        t.start() ;
    }

Listing 2 shows the new way using lambdas.

public void Listing2() {

        Thread t = new Thread(()->System.out.println("Hello Lambdas")) ;
        t.start() ;
    }

Listing 2 has no anonymous class.  It is much more compact.

()->System.out.println is the lambda.

Syntax

The syntax is

(type)->statement
 Where type is the parameter passed in. In our example, there was no parameter. Hence the syntax was ()->statement

If you had multiple parameters, the syntax would be
(type1,type2)->statement

If you had multiple statements, the syntax would be a
(type) ->{statement1; statement2} ;

Storing in a variable

The lambda expression can also be stored in variable and passed around as shown in listing 3.

 public void Listing3() {
        Runnable r = ()->System.out.println("Hello functional interface") ;
        Thread t = new Thread(r) ;
        t.start() ;
    }

Functional interface

JAVA 8 introduces a new term functional interface. It is an interface with just one abstract method that needs to be implemented. The lambda expression provides the implementation for the method. For that reason, lambda expressions can be assigned to variables that are functional interfaces. In the example above Runnable is the functional interface.

You can create new functional interfaces. They are ordinary interfaces but with only one abstract method. @FunctionalInterface is an annotation that may be used to document the fact that an interface is functional.

Listing 5 show the definition and usage of a functional interface.

@FunctionalInterface
    public interface Greeting {
        public void sayGreeting() ;
    }

    public static void greet(Greeting s) {
        s.sayGreeting();
    }

    @Test
    public void Listing5() {
        // old way
        greet(new Greeting() {
            @Override
            public void sayGreeting() {
                System.out.println("Hello old way") ;
            }
        }) ;

        // lambda new way
        greet(()->System.out.println("Hello lambdas")) ;
    }
}

Once again you can see that the code with lambdas is much more compact. Within an anonymous class, the "this" variable resolves to the anonymous class. But within a lambda, the this variable resolves to the enclosing class.

java.util.Function

The java.util.Function package in JDK 8 has several starter ready to use functional interfaces. For example the Consumer interface takes a single argument and returns no result. This is widely used in new methods in the java.util.collections package. Listing 6 shows one such use with the foreach method added to Iterable interface, that can be used to process all elements in a collection.

@Test
    public void Listing6() {
         List l = Arrays.asList(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) ;
         l.forEach((i)->System.out.println(i*i)) ;
    }

 

In summary, Java 8 lambdas introduce a new programming style to java. It attempts to bring JAVA up to par with other languages that claim to be superior because they support functional programming. It is not all just programming style. Lambdas do provide some performance advantages. I will examine them more in future blogs.


Monday, July 20, 2015

ConcurrentHashMap vs ConcurrentSkipListMap

In the blog Map classes, we discussed the map classes in java.util package. In blog ConcurrentHashMap, we ventured into concurrent collections and discussed the features of ConcurrentHashMap, which offers much superior concurrency than a conventional HashMap.

In this blog we discuss another concurrent map, the ConcurrentSkipListMap and compare it with ConcurrentHashMap. Package java.util has a HashMap and TreeMap. Have you ever wondered why java.util.concurrent has a ConcurrentHashMap, but no ConcurrentTreeMap and why there is a ConcurrentSkipListMap ?

In the non concurrent Collections, there is a  HashMap and TreeMap. HashMap for O(1) time complexity and TreeMap for maintaining a sorted order but O(logn) complexity. The implementation of a tree map is not a ordinary binary search tree(BST), because a BST that is not balanced degrades in performance to O(n) for input that is already sorted. TreeMap is implemented as a Red black tree, whose implementation is complex and involves balancing the tree (moving the nodes around) when nodes are added or removed.  The complexity is even more when you try to make the implementation concurrent (safe for concurrent use). For that reason there is no ConcurrentTreeMap in java.util.concurrent.

A concurrent implementation of SkipList is simpler. Hence, for a Map that is ordered and concurrent,the implementators choose SkipList.

What is a Skip List ?

A skiplist is an ordered linked list with o(log n) worst case search time. An ordinary linked list has o(n) worst case search time. A skip list provides faster search by maintaining layers of links, allowing the search to skip  nodes. As shown in the figure, the lowest layer is an ordinary linked list. But each higher layer skips some (more) nodes.

level4 10-------------------------------------100-null
level3 10-----------------50-----------------100-null
level2 10-------30------ 50-----70---------100-null
level1 10 -20 -30 -40 -50 -60-70-80-90-100-null

Let us you need to find 80 in the list.
Start are highest level 4. Search linearly to find the node that is equal to or whose next node is greater than 80. At level 4, 100 is greater than 80. So at node 10, move down to level 3.

At level 3, node 10, 50 is less than 80. Move to node 50. Next node 100 is greater that 50. Move down to level 2 at node 50.

At level 2 node 50, next node is 70 which is less than 80. Move to node 70.  Next node is 100 which is greater than 80. Move to level 1 at node 70.

At level 1, this is the last level. Keep going forward from 70 till you find 80 or reach end of the list.

Adding more levels can leads to faster search.

Skiplist has O(logn) performance for search, insert and delete. Depending on number of levels, it does use some extra space. Space complexity is O(nlogn).

In general, you will use a ConcurrentHashMap, if you must have O(1) for both get and put operations, but do not care about the ordering in the collection. You will use a ConcurrentSkipListMap if you need an ordered collection (sorted), but can tolerate O(logn) performance for get and put.

Lastly, SkipList is easier to implement than a balanced tree and is become the data structure of choice for ordered concurrent Map.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Apache Cassandra: Compaction

In Cassandra vs HBase, I provided an an overview of Cassandra. In Cassandra data model, I covered data modeling in Cassandra. In this blog, I go a little bit into Cassandra internals and discuss Compaction, a topic that is a source of grief for many users. Very often you hear that during compaction, performance degrades. We will discuss what compaction is, why it is necessary and the different types of compaction.

Compaction is process of merging multiple SSTables into larger tables. It removes data that has been marked for deletion and reduces fragmentation. Generally it happens automatically in the background, but can be started manually as well.

Why is compaction necessary ?

Cassandra is optimized for writes. A write is first written in memory to a table called Memtable. When Memtable reaches a certain size it is written in its entirety to disk as a new SSTable. SStable has an index which consists of sorted keys, which point to the location  in file that has the columns. SSTables are immutable. They are never updated.

The high throughput for writes is achieved by always appending and never seeking before writing . Updates to existing keys are also written to the current Memtable and eventually written to a new SStable. There are no disk seeks while writing.

Obviously, over time there are going to be several SSTables on disk. Not only that, but the latest column values for a single key might be spread over several SSTables.

How does this affect reads ?

Reading from one SSTable is easy. Find the key in the index. Keys are sorted. So a binary search would find the key. After that it is one disk seek to the location of the columns.

But as pointed out earlier, the updates for a single key might be spread over several SSTables. So for the latest values, Cassandra would need to read several SSTables and merge updates based on timestamps before returning columns.

Rather than do this for every read, it is worthwhile to merge SSTables in the background, so that when a read request arrives, Cassandra needs to just read from fewer SSTables ( one would be ideal).

Compaction

Compaction is the process of merging SSTables in order to
  • read columns for partition key from as few SSTables as possible
  • remove deleted data
  • reduce fragmentation
We did not talk about delete earlier. When Cassandra receives a request to delete a partition key, it merely marks it for deletion but does not actually remove the data associated with the key. The term used in Cassandra is "tombstone". A tombstone is created. During compaction, tombstones are supposed to be removed.

Types of Compaction

Size tiered compaction:

This is based on number of  SSTables and size of table. A compaction is triggered when the number tables and their size reaches a certain threshhold. Tables of similar size are grouped into buckets for compaction. Smaller tables are merged into a larger table.

Some disadvantages of size tiered compaction are that read performance can vary because the columns for a partition key can be spread over several SSTables. A lot for free space ( double the current storage) is required during compaction, since the merge process is making a copy.

Leveled compaction:

There are multiple levels of SSTables. SSTables within a level are of the same size and non overlapping (Within each level, a partition key will be in one SSTable only) . SSTables in the higher levels are larger. Data from the lower levels is merged into SSTables of the higher levels.
Leveled compaction tries to ensure that most reads happen from 1 SSTable. The worst read performance is bound by the number of levels. This works well for read heavy workloads because Cassandra knows which SSTable within each level to check for the key. But more work needs to be done during compaction especially for write(insert)  heavy workloads. Due to the extra work to ensure a fixed number of SSTables, there is a lot more IO.

Data tiered compaction:

 Data written within a certain period of time say 1 hr is merged in one SSTable.  This works well when you are writing time series data and querying based on timestamp. A query such as give me columns written in the last 1 hr can be serviced by reading just 1 SSTable. This also makes it easy to remove tombstones that are based on TTL. Data with the same TTL is likely to be in the same SSTable and the entire SSTable can be dropped.

Manual compaction:

This is compaction started manually using the nodetool compact command. A keyspace and table are specified. If you do not specify the table, the compaction will run on all tables. This is called a major compaction. It involves a lot of IO and is generally not done.

In summary, compaction is really fundamental to distributed databases like Cassandra. Without the append only architecture, write throughput would be much lower. And high write through put is necessary for high scalable systems or stated in another way - writes are much harder to scale and are generally the bottleneck. Read can be scaled easily by de-normalization , replication and caching.

Even with relational databases, applications do not go to Oracle or MySql for every read. Typically there is cache like Memcached or Redis, that caches frequently read data. For predictable read performance consider fronting Cassandra with a fast cache. Another strategy is to use different Cassandra clusters for different workloads. Read requests can be sent to clusters optimized for read.

Lastly , Leveled compaction works better for read intensive loads where as Data tiered compaction is suited for time series data and when the there is steady write rate. Size tiered compaction is used with write intensive workloads. But there is no silver bullet. You have to try, measure and tune for optimal performance with your workload.


Related Blogs:

Cassandra vs HBase
Cassandra data model
Choosing Cassandra







Saturday, March 28, 2015

Apache Kafka : New producer API in 0.8.2

In Kafka version 0.8.2, there is a newer, better and faster version of the Producer API. You might recall from earlier blogs that the Producer is used to send messages to a topic. If you are new to Kafka, please read following blogs first.

Apache Kafka Introduction
Apache Kafka JAVA tutorial #1 

Some features of the new producer are :
  • Asynchronously send messages to a topic.
  • Send returns immediately. Producer buffers messages and sends them to broker in the background.
  • Thanks to buffering, many messages sent to broker at one time without waiting for responses.
  • Send method returns a Future<RecordMetadata>. RecordMetadata has information on the record like which partition it stored in and what the offset is.
  • Caller may optionally provide a callback, which gets called when the message is acknowledged.
  • Buffer can at times fill up. Buffer size is configurable and can be configured using the total.memory.bytes configuration property.
  • If the buffer fills up, the Producer can either block or throw an exception. The behavior is controlled by the block.on.buffer.full configuration property.
In the rest of the blog we will use Producer API to rewrite the Producer we wrote in tutorial #1

For this example, you will need the following

For this tutorial you will need

(1) Apache Kafka 0.8.2
(2) JDK 7 or higher. An IDE of your choice is optional
(3) Apache Maven
(4) Source code for this sample from https://github.com/mdkhanga/my-blog-code so you can look at working code.

In this tutorial we take the Producer we wrote in Step 5 Kafka tutorial 1 and rewrite it using the new API. We will send messages to a topic on a Kafka Cluster and consume it with the consumer we wrote in that tutorial.

Step 1: Step up a Kafka cluster and create a topic

If you are new to Kafka, you can read and follow the instructions in my tutorial 1 to setup a cluster and create a topic.

Step 2: Get the source code for tutorial 1,2,3 from https://github.com/mdkhanga/my-blog-code

Copy KafkaProducer.java to KafkaProducer082.java. We will port KafkaProducer082 to the new producer API.

Step 3: Write the new Producer

Update the maven dependencies in pom.xml.

For the new producer you will need

<dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.kafka</groupId>
          <artifactId>kafka-clients</artifactId>
          <version>0.8.2.0</version>
 </dependency>

The rest of the client code also needs to be updated to 0.8.2.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.kafka</groupId>
    <artifactId>kafka_2.10</artifactId>
    <version>0.8.2.0</version>
</dependency>

The new producer will not work if rest of the client uses 0.8.1 or lower versions.

Step 3.1: Imports

Remove the old imports and add these.


import org.apache.kafka.clients.producer.KafkaProducer ;
import org.apache.kafka.clients.producer.ProducerRecord;

Note the packages.

Step 3.2: Create the producer

Properties props = new Properties();
props.put("bootstrap.servers", "localhost:9092");
props.put("key.serializer", "org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringSerializer");
props.put("value.serializer", "org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringSerializer");
props.put("request.required.acks", "1");

KafkaProducer producer = new KafkaProducer(props);

As in the past, you provide some configuration like which broker to connect to as Properties. The key and value serializers have to be provided. There are no default values.

Step 3.3: Send Messages

String date = "04092014" ;
String topic = "mjtopic" ;
     
for (int i = 1 ; i <= 1000000 ; i++) {
          
   String msg = date + " This is message " + i ;
   ProducerRecord data = new ProducerRecord(topic, 
            String.valueOf(i), msg);
            
    Future rs = producer.send(data, new Callback() {
        @Override
        public void onCompletion(RecordMetadata recordMetadata, Exception e) {

          System.out.println("Received ack for partition=" + recordMetadata.partition() +

           " offset = " + recordMetadata.offset()) ;
        }
      });

      try {
        RecordMetadata rm = rs.get();
        msg = msg + "  partition = " + rm.partition() +  " offset =" + rm.offset() ;
        System.out.println(msg) ;
      } catch(Exception e) {
        System.out.println(e) ;
      }

         
}

As mentioned earlier. The send is async and it will batch messages before sending to the broker. The send method immediately returns a Future that has the partition and offset in the partition for message send. We provide a callback to the send method whose onCompletion method is called when an acknowledgement for the message is received.

Step 4: Start the Consumer

mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="com.mj.KafkaConsumer"

Step 5: Start the Producer

mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="com.mj.KafkaProducer082" 


You should start seeing messages in the consumer.

In summary, the new producer API is asynchronous, scalable and returns useful metadata on the message sent.


Related Blogs:
Apache Kafka Introduction
Apache Kafka JAVA tutorial #1
Apache Kafka JAVA tutorial #2 
Apache Kafka JAVA tutorial #3


Friday, January 23, 2015

MongoDB tutorial #1 : Introduction

In the blog NoSQL, I provided an introduction to NoSql databases. We have discussed some NoSql databases such as HBase, Cassandra , Redis. In this blog, we discuss MongoDB, a document oriented database, which is in contrast to the key value stores we discussed  earlier. MongoDB is currently one of the more popular NoSql databases, primarily due to its ease of use and simpler programming model. But there have been reports that it lags in scalability or performance compared to other NoSql databases. And it has more moving parts. But its ease of use and low learning curve makes it an attractive choice in many scenarios.

The key features of MongoDB are:
  • The unit of storage like a record in relational databases or key-value pair in key value stores, is a document or more precisely a JSON document.  
    • { "employee_id":"12345",
    •    "name":"John doe",
    •    "department": "database team",
    •    "title":"architect",
    •    "start_date":"1/1/2015" }
  • Documents are stored in collections.
  • Collection can be indexed by field. 
  • Indexing support for faster queries.
  • No schema is required for the collection.
  • MongoDB is highly available using replication and automatic failover. Write happens to a primary server but can be replicated to multiple replicas. If the primary goes down, one of the replicas takes over as the primary.
  • Read operations can be scaled by sending the reads to the replicas as well.
  • Write operations are scaled by sharding.
  • Sharding is automatic.But has a couple of moving parts
    • Sharding is based on a key which is an indexed field or a indexed compound field.
    • Sharding can be range based or hash based. With range based, partitioning is based on key range, so that values close to each other are together.  With Hash based, the partioning is based on a hash of the key.
    • Data set is divided into chunks. Each shard manages some chunks
    • Query routers are used to send the request to the right shard.
    • Config servers hold meta data on which chunks are with which shard.
    • If a chunk grows too large, it is broken up. If some shards own more chunks than others, the cluster is automatically rebalanced by redistributing the chunks.
In the rest of the blog, let us fire up a mongodb instance, create some data and learn how to query it.

Step 1: Download Mongo

You can download the server from www.mongodb.org/downloads.
I like to download the generic linux version and untar it.

Untar/unzip it to a directory of your choice.

Step 2 : Start the server

Decide on a directory to store the data. Say ~/mongodata. Create the directory.

Change to the directory where you installed mongo. To start the server, type the command.

bin/mongod -dbpath ~/mongodata

Step 3: Start the mongo client

bin/mongo

Step 4: Create and insert some data into a collection

Create and use a database.
> use testDb ;

Create a employee document and insert into the employees collection.
> emp1 = { "employee_id":"12345", "name":"John doe", "department": "database team", "title":"architect", "start_date":"1/1/2015" }
> db.employees.insert(emp1)

Retrieve the document.
> db.employees.find()
{ "_id" : ObjectId("54c2de34426d3d4ea1226498"), "employee_id" : "12345", "name" : "John doe", "department" : "database team", "title" : "architect", "start_date" : "1/1/2015" }

Step 5 : Insert a few more employees

> emp2 = { "employee_id":"12346", "name":"Ste Curr", "department": "database team", "title":"developer1", "start_date":"12/1/2013" }
> db.employees.insert(emp2)

> emp3 = { "employee_id":"12347", "name":"Dre Grin", "department": "QA team", "title":"developer2", "start_date":"12/1/2011" }
> db.employees.insert(emp3)

> emp4 = { "employee_id":"12348", "name":"Daev Eel", "department": "Build team", "title":"developer3", "start_date":"12/1/2010" }
> db.employees.insert(emp4)

Step 6: Queries

Query by attribute equality
> db.employees.find({"name" : "Ste Curr"} )
{ "_id" : ObjectId("54c2e0de426d3d4ea1226499"), "employee_id" : "12346", "name" : "Ste Curr", "department" : "database team", "title" : "developer1", "start_date" : "12/1/2013"  }

Query by attribute with regex condition
> db.employees.find({"department":{$regex : "data*"}})
{ "_id" : ObjectId("54c2de34426d3d4ea1226498"), "employee_id" : "12345", "name" : "John doe", "department" : "database team", "title" : "architect", "start_date" : "1/1/2015" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("54c2e0de426d3d4ea1226499"), "employee_id" : "12346", "name" : "Ste Curr", "department" : "database team", "title" : "developer1", "start_date" : "12/1/2013" }

Query using less than , greater than conditions
> db.employees.find({"employee_id":{$gte : "12347"}})
{ "_id" : ObjectId("54c2e382426d3d4ea122649a"), "employee_id" : "12347", "name" : "Dre Grin", "department" : "QA team", "title" : "developer2", "start_date" : "12/1/2011" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("54c2e3af426d3d4ea122649b"), "employee_id" : "12348", "name" : "Daev Eel", "department" : "Build team", "title" : "developer3", "start_date" : "12/1/2010" }

> db.employees.find({"employee_id":{$lte : "12346"}})
{ "_id" : ObjectId("54c2de34426d3d4ea1226498"), "employee_id" : "12345", "name" : "John doe", "department" : "database team", "title" : "architect", "start_date" : "1/1/2015" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("54c2e0de426d3d4ea1226499"), "employee_id" : "12346", "name" : "Ste Curr", "department" : "database team", "title" : "developer1", "start_date" : "12/1/2013" }

Step 7: Cursors

Iterate through results.
> var techguys = db.employees.find()
> while ( techguys.hasNext() ) printjson( techguys.next() )
{
    "_id" : ObjectId("54c2de34426d3d4ea1226498"),
    "employee_id" : "12345",
    "name" : "John doe",
    "department" : "database team",
    "title" : "architect",
    "start_date" : "1/1/2015"
}
.
.
.

Step 8: Delete records

Delete one record
> db.employees.remove({"employee_id" : "12345"})
WriteResult({ "nRemoved" : 1 })

Delete all records
> db.employees.remove({})
WriteResult({ "nRemoved" : 3 })

As you can see MongoDb is pretty easy to use. Download and give it a try. 




Friday, January 9, 2015

Apache Kafka JAVA tutorial #3: Once and only once delivery

In Apache Kafka introduction, I provided an architectural overview on the internet scale messaging broker. In JAVA tutorial 1, we learnt how to send and receive messages using the high level consumer API. In JAVA tutorial 2, We examined partition leaders and metadata using the lower level Simple consumer API.

A key requirement of many real world messaging applications is that a message should be delivered once and only once to a consumer. If you have used the traditional JMS based message brokers, this is generally supported out of the box, with no additional work from the application programmer. But Kafka has distributed architecture where the messages to a topic are partitioned for scalability and replicated for fault tolerance and hence the application programmer  has to do a little more to ensure once and only once delivery.

Some key features of the Simple Consumer API are:
  • To fetch a message, you need to know the partition and partition leader.
  • You can read messages in the partition several times.
  • You can read from the first message in the partition or from a known offset.
  • With each read, you are returned an offset where the next read can happen.
  • You can implement once and only once read, by storing the offsets with the message that was just read, thereby making the read transactional. In the event of a crash, you can recover because you know what message was last read and where the next one should be read.
  • Not covered in this tutorial, but the API lets you determine how many partitions there are for a topic and who the leader for each partition is. While fetching message, you connect to the leader. Should a leader go down, you need to fail over by determining who the new leader is, connect to it and continue consuming messages
For this tutorial you will need

(1) Apache Kafka 0.8.1
(2) Apache Zookeeper
(3) JDK 7 or higher. An IDE of your choice is optional
(4) Apache Maven
(5) Source code for this sample from https://github.com/mdkhanga/my-blog-code if you want to look at working code

In this tutorial, we will
(1) start a Kafka broker
(2) create a topic with 1 partition
(3) Send a messages to the topic
(4) Write a consumer using Simple API to fetch messages.
(5) Crash the consumer and restart it ( several times). Each time you will see that it reads the next message after the last one that was read.

Since we are focusing of reading messages from a particular offset in a partition, we will keep other things simple by limiting ourselves to 1 broker and 1 partition.

Step 1: Start the broker


bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server1.properties

For the purposes of this tutorial, one broker is sufficient as we are reading from just one partition.

Step 2: Create the topic

bin/kafka-topics.sh --create --zookeeper localhost:2181 --partitions 1 --topic atopic

Again for the purposes of this tutorial we just need 1 partition.

Step 3: Send messages to the topic

Run the producer we wrote in tutorial 1 to send say 1000 messages to this topic.

Step 4: Write a consumer using SimpleConsumer API

The complete code is in the file KafkaOnceAndOnlyOnceRead.java.

Create a file to store the next read offset. 

static {
    try {
      readoffset = new RandomAccessFile("readoffset", "rw");
    } catch (Exception e) {
      System.out.println(e);
    }

}

Create a SimpleConsumer.

SimpleConsumer consumer = new SimpleConsumer("localhost", 9092, 100000, 64 * 1024, clientname);

If there is a offset stored in the file, we will read from the offset. Otherwise, we read from the beginining of the partition -- EarliestTime.

 long offset_in_partition = 0 ;
    try {
      offset_in_partition = readoffset.readLong();
    } catch(EOFException ef) {
      offset_in_partition =     getOffset(consumer,topic,partition,kafka.api.OffsetRequest.EarliestTime(),clientname) ;
    }


The rest of the code is in a

while (true) {

}

loop. We will keep reading messages or sleep if there are none.

Within the loop, we create a request and fetch messages from the offset.

FetchRequest req = new FetchRequestBuilder()
          .clientId(clientname)
          .addFetch(topic, partition, offset_in_partition, 100000).build();
FetchResponse fetchResponse = consumer.fetch(req);


Read messages from the response.

for (MessageAndOffset messageAndOffset : fetchResponse.messageSet(topic, partition)) {
        long currentOffset = messageAndOffset.offset();
        if (currentOffset < offset_in_partition) {
          continue;
        }
        offset_in_partition = messageAndOffset.nextOffset();
        ByteBuffer payload = messageAndOffset.message().payload();

        byte[] bytes = new byte[payload.limit()];
        payload.get(bytes);
        System.out.println(String.valueOf(messageAndOffset.offset()) + ": " + new String(bytes, "UTF-8"));
        readoffset.seek(0);
        readoffset.writeLong(offset_in_partition);
        numRead++;
        messages++ ;

        if (messages == 10) {
          System.out.println("Pretend a crash happened") ;
          System.exit(0);
        }
  }


For each message that we read, we check that the offset is not less than the one we want to read from. If it is, we ignore the message. For efficiency, Kafka batches messages. So you can get messages already read. For each valid message, we print it and write the next read offset to the file. If the consumer were to crash, when restarted, it would start reading from the last saved offset.

For demo purposes, the code exits after 10 messages. If you run this program several times, you will see that it starts reading exactly from where it last stopped. You can change that value and experiment.

Step 5: Run the consumer several times.

mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="com.mj.KafkaOnceAndOnlyOnceRead"

210: 04092014 This is message 211
211: 04092014 This is message 212
212: 04092014 This is message 213
213: 04092014 This is message 214
214: 04092014 This is message 215
215: 04092014 This is message 216
216: 04092014 This is message 217
217: 04092014 This is message 218
218: 04092014 This is message 219
219: 04092014 This is message 220


run it again 

mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="com.mj.KafkaOnceAndOnlyOnceRead"

220: 04092014 This is message 221
221: 04092014 This is message 222
222: 04092014 This is message 223
223: 04092014 This is message 224
224: 04092014 This is message 225
225: 04092014 This is message 226
226: 04092014 This is message 227
227: 04092014 This is message 228
228: 04092014 This is message 229
229: 04092014 This is message 230


In Summary, it is possible to implement one and only once delivery of messages in Kafka by storing the read offset.

Related Blogs:

Apache Kafka Introduction
Apache Kafka JAVA tutorial #1
Apache Kafka JAVA tutorial #2 
Apache Kafka 0.8.2 New Producer API