anchor.diff:  Debezium uses a single-task based architecture and this opens the possibilities to really harness the power of a multi-node Kafka Connect cluster and distribute chunks of work across multiple tasks.
   Furthermore, this can be extended to other connectors such as Oracle.
   
  -This has been a wonderful journey with the folks at SugarCRM, and we're all still just getting started with what's to come.
  -We very much appreciate all their work they put into making this possible for the Debezium community!
  -
  +This work has been led by the team around link:/blog/2021/08/23/debezium-community-stories-with-sergei-morozov/[Sergei Morozov] of SugarCRM,
  +who already deploy the SQL Server connector in multi-partition mode built from an internal fork,
  +which they internally maintain until the entire work has been upstreamed.
  +We'd like to say a huge, huge thank you to Sergei, Jacob Gminder, Mike Kamornikov,
  +and everyone else from SugarCRM who worked tirelessly to make this possible for the Debezium community,
  +and we're looking forward very much to continuing and further expanding this close collaboration.
   
   == Other Fixes and Changes
   
   Further fixes and improvements in the 1.9.0.Beta1 release include:
   
  -* Support for reading and storing connector offsets inside Redis when using the https://github.com/debezium/debezium/tree/main/debezium-server/debezium-server-redis[Redis sink] with Debezium Server (https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4509[DBZ-4509])
   * Various DDL parser fixes for both MySQL (https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4707[DBZ-4707]) and Oracle (https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4641[DBZ-4641] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4662[DBZ-4662] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4706[DBZ-4706] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4746[DBZ-4746] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4746[DBZ-4752] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4763[DBZ-4763])
  -* Corrected a long-running transaction with the PostgreSQL connector (https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-2306[DBZ-2306])
  +* Corrected a long-running transaction issue with the PostgreSQL connector (https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-2306[DBZ-2306])
   * Oracle connector stability improvements (https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4635[DBZ-4635] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4715[DBZ-4715] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4723[DBZ-4723] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4737[DBZ-4737] https://issues.redhat.com/browse/DBZ-4744[DBZ-4744])
   
   Please refer to the link:/releases/1.9/release-notes#release-1.9.0-beta1[release notes] to learn more about these and further fixes in this release.
  
positive.code: 
  I am happy to announce the release of Debezium *1.9.0.Beta1*!
  
  This release includes many new features for Debezium Sink including Knative event support,
  offset storage management with the Redis sink,
  multi-partitioned SQL Server scaling,
  and various of bugfixes and improvements.
  Overall, https://issues.redhat.com/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20DBZ%20AND%20fixVersion%20%3D%201.9.0.Beta1%20ORDER%20BY%20component%20ASC[56 issues] have been fixed for this release.
  
  
negative.code: debezium.sink.http.url=https://<hostname>/<end-point>
  ```
  
  We're super excited about this new sink connector and we look forward to all your feedback.
  A big thank you to https://github.com/cab105[Chris Baumbauer] for this excellent contribution!
  
  == Redis-managed Offsets for Debezium Server
  
  Several folks from https://redis.com/[Redis] stepped up lately for improving the story around integrating Debezium and https://redis.io/topics/streams-intro[Redis Streams].
  After the performance improvements done in 1.9.0.Alpha1 (by means of batching),
  another result of that work is the ability to link:/documentation/reference/1.9/operations/debezium-server.html#debezium-source-offset-storage[store connector offsets] in Redis.
  For the next 1.9 early access release you can expect a database history implementation backed by Redis,
  and the team also is working on implementing retry support for Debezium Server.
  Thanks a lot to https://github.com/spicy-sauce[Yossi Shirizli],
  https://github.com/zalmane[Oren Elias] and all the other Redis folks contributing not only to the Redis Streams sink, but also to Debezium and Debezium Server at large!
  
  == Multi-partitioned Scaling for SQL Server Connector
  
  Some database platforms, such as SQL Server and Oracle, support the creation and management of multiple logical databases within a single physical database server instance.
  Traditionally, streaming changes from the multiple logical databases required a separate connector deployment.
  Now there isn't anything innately wrong with such a deployment strategy, but it can quickly start to show its shortcomings if you have many logical databases;
  for instance in case of multi-tenancy scenarios with one logical database per tenant,
  the overhead of setting up and operating one connector per database can become a bottleneck.
  Besides that, processing change events from multiple logical databases lends itself perfectly well to parallelization by means of Kafka Connect's concept of tasks.
  
  Over the last several 1.x releases, a tremendous amount of work has gone into key fundamental changes to Debezium's common connector framework, setting the stage for a new horizontal scaling strategy.
  
  One of the initial goals of this new strategy is to eliminate the need for multiple connector deployments when streaming changes from multiple logical databases within a single SQL Server instance.
  Additionally, it was critical to expose metrics in a way that enables monitoring tools to report on the state and health of the connector both from a connector-centric perspective but also from each logical database being processed.
  In this release, we've achieved those goals.
  
  But this is just the beginning folks!
  