Description

Currently, the Debezium Oracle connector does not allow users to specify an initial SCN (start_scn) from which the connector should start capturing changes.
In some scenarios, it is desirable to control the exact starting point:
• When re-deploying a connector and needing to restart from a known SCN
• For disaster recovery or replay scenarios
• When initializing CDC for a subset of data without having to snapshot the whole database

Other connectors (e.g., Confluent’s Oracle XStream CDC connector) allow setting an SCN during startup in recovery mode. It would be useful if Debezium’s Oracle connector supported a similar configuration option.

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Proposed Solution

Introduce a new optional configuration property for the Oracle connector, for example: "start.scn": "1234567890"

If set, the connector should begin streaming changes from the specified SCN, instead of performing an initial snapshot or starting from the latest available SCN.

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Alternatives Considered
• Using snapshots (not feasible in very large databases)
• Manually manipulating offset storage (complex and error-prone)

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Benefits
• More control for administrators during connector setup and recovery
• Easier rollback/restart in CDC pipelines
• Consistency with other CDC tools that already support SCN-based starting points