Does it make sense to use the schema registry with Avro SpecificRecord?

user_1251219 0
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I am a consumer and want to use SpecificRecord in Avro for type safety to avoid manually mapping things from a GenericRecord. As I understand things it makes little sense for me to still integrate with the schema registry because I could not do anything about the new schema in my consumer code anyways. Note that the schema registry has the full transitive mode enabled for any schema changes (I know that default values can still be changed and might lead to breaking changes).

Why use schema registry together with SpecificRecord in consumer code?

confluent-schema-registry avro
1 Answers

I can answer my own question, because we tried it, and it’s impossible to use the schema registry together with SpecificRecord if you want to have schema evolution. Your code simply breaks at runtime, because it cannot find the required version. Hence, the only way to work with Avro and schema evolution is via GenericRecord, and integrating with the schema registry in case of SpecificRecord provides no value.

Compare this with Protobuf, where you have both, generated code and schema evolution.

user_12512190
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