Advanced Features

Partitioning

The partitions provided with each RFC/RFM result equals the name of the function module, as each function module name is unique per SAP instance.

Parallelism

The RFC Source Connector achieves parallelism by assigning each RFC/RFM to a single worker task. If the number of configured RFCs/RFMs exceeds either the maxTasks configuration or the available number of tasks, a single task will handle extractions for multiple RFMs.

• Scaling by adding tasks therefore only makes sense if the amount of configured RFMs is greater than the amount of available tasks.
• Scaling by adding topic partitions makes no sense at all, as we only use one partition to guarantee sequential order.

Scheduling

The connector is meant to run continuously according to streaming principles. Nevertheless, a clock period can be set using configuration property exec-period per single RFC source. A data extraction will then take place only once in a clock period interval. As an alternative one can use configuration properties cron.expression and cron.security.time.sec to define a cron-like schedule, e.g. if a source system specifies strict timeframes for extraction processes.

Plugin Discovery

Plugin Discovery is the strategy the Connect worker uses to find plugin classes and make them available for configuration and execution. This process is controlled by the worker’s plugin.discovery setting.

By default, the plugin.discovery setting is HYBRID_WARN, which is compatible with all plugins and logs a warning if it encounters any plugins incompatible with the SERVICE_LOAD mode. The SERVICE_LOAD option, which uses the faster ServiceLoader mechanism, may improve performance during worker startup, but will not load incompatible plugins. See Connect Worker Configuration for all plugin.discovery values.

The RFC Source Connector supports the ServiceLoader mechanism.