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Azure Schema Registry in Event Hubs

  • Članak

Event streaming and messaging scenarios often deal with structured data in the event or message payload. However, the structured data is of little value to the event broker, which only deals with bytes. Schema-driven formats such as Apache Avro, JSONSchema, or Protobuf are often used to serialize or deserialize such structured data to/from binary.

An event producer uses a schema definition to serialize event payload and publish it to an event broker such as Event Hubs. Event consumers read event payload from the broker and deserialize it using the same schema definition.

So, both producers and consumers can validate the integrity of the data with the same schema.

Image showing producers and consumers serializing and deserializing event payload using schemas from the Schema Registry.

What is Azure Schema Registry?

Azure Schema Registry is a feature of Event Hubs, which provides a central repository for schemas for event-driven and messaging-centric applications. It provides the flexibility for your producer and consumer applications to exchange data without having to manage and share the schema. It also provides a simple governance framework for reusable schemas and defines relationship between schemas through a logical grouping construct (schema groups).

Image showing a producer and a consumer serializing and deserializing event payload using a schema from the Schema Registry.

With schema-driven serialization frameworks like Apache Avro, JSONSchema and Protobuf, moving serialization metadata into shared schemas can also help with reducing the per-message overhead. It's because each message doesn't need to have the metadata (type information and field names) as it's the case with tagged formats such as JSON.

Note

The feature is available in the Standard, Premium, and Dedicated tier.

Having schemas stored alongside the events and inside the eventing infrastructure ensures that the metadata required for serialization or deserialization is always in reach and schemas can't be misplaced.

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