Download Kafka JDBC Driver

Download the Kafka JDBC driver, copy the JDBC URL into DbSchema, and start designing schemas with ER diagrams — free Community Edition.

About the Kafka JDBC driver

A JDBC driver is a Java .jar library that lets applications connect to Kafka. DbSchema uses JDBC to reverse engineer schemas, run SQL, and generate documentation. Driver files are usually published by the database vendor or an open-source project.

JDBC URL format

Host, port, database name, and SSL options are passed in a URL starting with jdbc:. Each Kafka driver uses its own syntax — see the connection details below.

The Kafka JDBC driver

Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform used for real-time pipelines, log aggregation, and microservice communication. Data is organized into topics that store ordered, append-only message streams consumed by applications across a cluster.

DbSchema provides an open-source JDBC driver for Kafka that maps topics to tables, introspects message structure from samples or Confluent Schema Registry, and lets you query topic data with SQL-style statements from DbSchema's SQL editor.

The Kafka JDBC URL

• Required File(s): kafka-jdbc-driver.jar
• Java Driver Class: com.wisecoders.jdbc.kafka.JdbcDriver
• JDBC URL: jdbc:kafka://{HOST}[:{PORT}][/{CATALOG}]?scan={fast|medium|full}&schemaRegistry={URL}&groupId={GROUP}
• Website: kafka.apache.org

The default Kafka broker port is 9092. Use scan=fast (default) for quick topic structure discovery, or scan=medium / scan=full to sample more messages when inferring JSON payloads. When schemaRegistry is set, the driver reads Avro or JSON Schema subjects from Confluent Schema Registry instead of sampling messages. Append ?expand=true to flatten JSON values into result columns.

Downloading the Kafka JDBC Driver

Download Kafka JDBC Driver

The driver archive is a zip file. Unzip it to obtain the driver jar. The source code is available on GitHub.

Driver Source Code

DbSchema and Kafka

DbSchema lists Kafka topics as schema objects, infers columns from message payloads or Schema Registry definitions, and lets you browse topic data with SELECT and LIST TOPICS through the JDBC layer.