Debezium Won't Start? The Whitespace Bug That Stumped Our Client We recently got a support ticket that looked simple at first. A client's Debezium MySQL connector kept failing at startup. The error pointed to message.key.columns . The config looked reasonable. But nothing worked. Here's what happened — and how we fixed it without touching the database schema. The Problem The client had a MySQL table with a space in its name: dbo.Sourcing Id Master . They configured the connector like this: "message.key.columns" : "dbo.Sourcing Id Master:id" Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Connector validation failed immediately. They tried escaping — backslashes, quotes, every combination. Same error every time. Why Escaping Doesn't Work Here The problem isn't at runtime. It's at config validation time. Debezium's validator for message.key.columns requires the fully-qualified table identifier to contain no whitespace. The validator rejects it before the connector even connects to MySQL. No escaping fixes this.…