Use Claude to Talk to Your Kafka Data via CData Connect AI

Stanley Liu
Stanley Liu
Associate Technical Product Marketer
Leverage the CData Connect AI Remote MCP Server to enable Claude to securely answer questions and take actions on your Kafka data for you.

Claude is a family of advanced large language models (LLMs) built by Anthropic, an AI research company founded in 2021. These models power the Claude conversational assistant and developer tools.

CData Connect AI offers a dedicated cloud-to-cloud interface for connecting to Kafka data. The CData Connect AI Remote MCP Server enables secure communication between Claude and Kafka. This allows you to ask questions and take actions on your Kafka data using Claude, all without the need for data replication to a natively supported database. With its inherent optimized data processing capabilities, CData Connect AI efficiently channels all supported SQL operations, including filters and JOINs, directly to Kafka. This leverages server-side processing to swiftly deliver the requested Kafka data.

Step 1: Configure Kafka Connectivity for Claude

Connectivity to Kafka from Claude is made possible through CData Connect AI Remote MCP. To interact with Kafka data from Claude, we start by creating and configuring a Kafka connection in CData Connect AI.

  1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
  2. Adding a Connection
  3. Select "Kafka" from the Add Connection panel
  4. Selecting a data source
  5. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Kafka.

    Set BootstrapServers and the Topic properties to specify the address of your Apache Kafka server, as well as the topic you would like to interact with.

    Authorization Mechanisms

    • SASL Plain: The User and Password properties should be specified. AuthScheme should be set to 'Plain'.
    • SASL SSL: The User and Password properties should be specified. AuthScheme should be set to 'Scram'. UseSSL should be set to true.
    • SSL: The SSLCert and SSLCertPassword properties should be specified. UseSSL should be set to true.
    • Kerberos: The User and Password properties should be specified. AuthScheme should be set to 'Kerberos'.

    You may be required to trust the server certificate. In such cases, specify the TrustStorePath and the TrustStorePassword if necessary.

    Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)
  6. Click Save & Test

Step 2: Connect Claude to CData Connect AI

Follow these steps to add a CData Connect AI connector in Claude:

  1. Sign in to Claude.ai or create a new account.
  2. Expand the left navigation menu.
  3. In the bottom-left corner, click your user name and select Settings from the menu. The Settings screen appears.
  4. In the Settings screen, click Connectors.
  5. Click the button to Browse Connectors.
  6. Search for "CData Connect AI" and click the listing. Adding CData Connect AI
  7. Click "Connect" and sign into your Connect AI account. Connecting to your Connect AI account
  8. After connecting, Claude opens a new chat.

Step 3: Explore Live Kafka Data with Claude

  1. You can now start exploring your data with natural language prompts. Claude outlines the steps it uses to retrieve data from the source in CData Connect AI. Refer to CData's prompt library for prompt ideas.
  2. Exploring data with Claude

NOTE: Claude's setup process is subject to change. Refer to Claude's documentation for the latest setup information.

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