Removing one message from a topic in Kafka

Question

I'm new at using Kafka and I have one question. Can I delete only ONE message from a topic if I know the topic, the offset and the partition? And if not is there any alternative?

Answer 1

It is not possible to remove a single message from a Kafka topic, even though you know its partition and offset.

Keep in mind, that Kafka is not a key/value store but a topic is rather an append-only(!) log that represents a stream of data.

If you are looking for alternatives to remove a single message you may

1. Have your consumer clients ignore that message

2. Enable log compaction and send a tompstone message

3. Write a simple job (KafkaStreams) to consume the data, filter out that one message and produce all messages to a new topic.