The Snowflake Connector for Kafka is a Kafka Connect sink connector that reads data from one or more Apache Kafka topics and loads the data into a Snowflake table. The connector supports different authentication methods to connect to Snowflake, such as key pair authentication, OAUTH, and basic authentication (for example, username and password). The connector also supports different encryption methods, such as HTTPS and SSL1. The connector does not require that every Kafka message is in JSON or Avro format, as it can handle other formats such as CSV, XML, and Parquet2. The default retention time for Kafka topics is not relevant for the connector, as it only consumes themessages that are available in the topics and does not store them in Kafka. The connector will create one table and one pipe to ingest data for each topic by default, but this behavior can be customized by using the snowflake.topic2table.map configuration property3. If the connector cannot create the table or the pipe, it will log an error and retry the operation until it succeeds or the connector is stopped4. References:
Installing and Configuring the Kafka Connector
Overview of the Kafka Connector
Managing the Kafka Connector
Troubleshooting the Kafka Connector