Free Practice Questions for Confluent CCDAK Exam

To ensure exactly-once delivery and avoid duplicates even during retries:

enable.idempotence=true ensures deduplication on the broker

retries=2147483647 allows unlimited retries on retriable errors

max.in.flight.requests.per.connection=5 is the maximum value that preserves message order with idempotence

From Kafka Producer Config Docs:

“To achieve exactly-once semantics, set enable.idempotence=true, and max.in.flight.requests.per.connection ≤ 5.”

A is unrelated (consumer-side)

C disables retries

D disables idempotence, leading to duplicates

The Apache Kafka consumer configuration max.poll.records explicitly controls the maximum number of records returned in a single call to Consumer.poll(). This is clearly documented in the official Kafka consumer configuration reference. It allows developers to limit the size of the batch returned to the application, helping to control processing latency, memory usage, and CPU load.

This setting does not affect how much data the broker sends to the consumer; instead, it limits how many records the consumer returns to the application layer from the fetched data. This makes it especially useful for applications where processing each record is expensive and needs predictable batch sizes.

Option B (max.records.consumer) does not exist in Kafka. Option C (fetch.max.records) is also invalid; Kafka uses fetch.max.bytes and related byte-based configurations, not record-count limits, at the fetch level. Option D (max.poll.records.interval) is not a valid Kafka configuration; the correct related setting is max.poll.interval.ms, which controls liveness, not batch size.

Thus, max.poll.records is the correct and officially documented configuration.

According to the official Apache Kafka client documentation, Kafka uses SLF4J (Simple Logging Facade for Java) for all client-side logging. SLF4J is only an abstraction layer and requires a concrete logging implementation to route log messages to the actual logging framework used by the application.

Since the application uses Log4j2, an SLF4J-to-Log4j2 binding must be provided. The correct and officially recommended dependency is org.apache.logging.log4j:log4j-slf4j-impl. This dependency acts as the SLF4J implementation and forwards all Kafka client log messages to Log4j2, ensuring consistent logging across the application.

Option B is incorrect because it targets the legacy Log4j 1.2 framework, which is deprecated and incompatible with Log4j2. Option C is insufficient because Log4j2 alone does not satisfy Kafka’s SLF4J dependency. Option D is incorrect because Kafka intentionally does not include a logging implementation transitively, allowing applications to choose their preferred logging framework.

Therefore, including the SLF4J implementation for Log4j2 is required to properly integrate Kafka client logs.

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The StickyAssignor tries to minimize partition movement by preserving existing assignments as much as possible while still achieving a balanced assignment. This improves consumer stability and reduces rebalances.

From the Kafka Consumer Assignor Documentation:

“The StickyAssignor attempts to preserve as many existing assignments as possible, which helps minimize partition movement between rebalances.”

RoundRobinAssignor focuses on even distribution, not stability.

RangeAssignor groups partitions by topic and assigns them consecutively, but can lead to imbalances.

PartitionAssignor is an abstract base class, not an assignor used directly.

In Kafka Streams, the number of stream tasks = number of input partitions × num.stream.threads × number of instances, but only as many as the number of partitions can actively consume at once.

However, in this case, Kafka Streams assigns one task per partition, and because there are 5 partitions and 15 threads (3 instances × 5 threads), 15 tasks are created, and all 15 can be active depending on processing topology.

From Kafka Streams Developer Guide:

"Kafka Streams creates one task per input partition. If you increase the number of stream threads, it runs multiple tasks in parallel within a single instance."

So, 15 stream tasks will be created and 15 will be actively consuming.

Kafka message headers are the right place to include metadata such as:

Payload format (e.g., schema version)

Timestamps (custom)

Trace or correlation IDs

From Kafka Producer API Docs:

“Headers are a map of key-value pairs that can be used to include metadata alongside the message, without modifying the message body.”

Keys determine partitioning and ordering

Values are the message payload

Brokers do not store arbitrary metadata fields

With acks=all and min.insync.replicas=2, Kafka requires at least two in-sync replicas to acknowledge a write. If only one broker is alive, the condition fails, and NotEnoughReplicasException is thrown by the producer.

From Kafka Producer Exception Docs:

“NotEnoughReplicasException is thrown when the number of in-sync replicas is insufficient to satisfy acks=all with min.insync.replicas.”

NetworkException is generic and not raised here.

NotCoordinatorException is related to consumer group coordination.

NotLeaderForPartitionException is unrelated unless accessing an unassigned leader.

The Apache Kafka Streams documentation clearly distinguishes between the Kafka Streams DSL and the Processor API. While the DSL is designed for common stream processing operations such as filtering, mapping, joining, and aggregations, it does not support fully custom processing logic.

For use cases that require custom transformations, fine-grained control over record processing, access to headers, timestamps, state stores, and punctuation, Kafka Streams provides the Processor API. This API allows developers to implement custom Processor, Transformer, or ValueTransformer classes and explicitly define the processing topology.

Option A (TopologyTestDriver) is a testing utility, not a development API. Option C (DSL) is higher-level and not suitable for advanced custom logic. Option D does not exist in Kafka.

Therefore, the correct and officially supported approach for defining custom processors in Kafka Streams is to use the Processor API.

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As documented in the official Apache Kafka Connect framework documentation, Kafka Connect workers form a logical cluster by using a Kafka consumer group. The configuration property that identifies this cluster is group.id.

All Kafka Connect workers configured with the same group.id automatically join the same Connect cluster. Kafka’s group coordination protocol is then used to distribute connector and task configurations among the workers, providing fault tolerance, scalability, and automatic rebalancing.

Option A (cluster.id) is a Kafka internal identifier used by brokers and is not configurable for Kafka Connect workers. Option B (worker.id) does not exist as a valid Kafka Connect configuration. Option D (connector.id) identifies individual connectors within a Connect cluster, not the worker cluster itself.

Therefore, the group.id property is the correct and officially documented configuration that determines which Kafka Connect cluster a worker belongs to.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

✅ C. Consumers can consume both committed and uncommitted transactions.By default, Kafka consumers only read committed messages if they are configured with isolation.level=read_committed. However, if configured as read_uncommitted, they can also consume uncommitted (potentially aborted) transactional messages.

From Kafka Documentation:

"The isolation.level setting controls whether the consumer will read only committed messages or all messages, including uncommitted messages from ongoing or aborted transactions."

✅ D. Information about producers and their transactions is stored in the _transaction_state topic.Kafka uses an internal topic named __transaction_state to maintain metadata about producer transactions. This topic is essential for tracking the transaction lifecycle, fencing, and recovery.

From Kafka Internals:

“Kafka stores the state of active and completed transactions in an internal topic called __transaction_state.”