Apache Kafka Practice Exam 2026 – The Complete All-in-One Guide for Exam Success!

Adding unique identifiers to each message is a highly effective approach for handling message duplication issues in Kafka due to its delivery semantics. Since Kafka provides at-least-once delivery, messages may be delivered multiple times, especially in scenarios like retries or failures. By incorporating unique identifiers, such as UUIDs or a combination of timestamps and sequence numbers, applications can keep track of which messages have already been processed.

When a message is received, the application can check its unique identifier against a storage system (like a database or in-memory store) to determine if it has already been processed. If the identifier is found, the application knows to ignore the message, thereby preventing the effects of duplication. This method allows for idempotent processing, where the outcome of processing a message is the same, regardless of how many times it may be processed.

In contrast, using higher levels of redundancy primarily focuses on ensuring that messages are available through replication but does not directly address the processing of duplicates. Increasing the message size is not relevant to duplication issues and may lead to inefficiencies in transmission. Implementing message prioritization deals with the order of message processing rather than the prevention of duplicate handling. Thus, incorporating unique identifiers is the most direct and practical way to manage message duplication in Kafka