title: kafka connect convertor vs transforms
body: <p>I am trying to create following workflow </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>nginx logs are picked up by kafka connector and uploaded to a topic</li>
  <li>An hdfs sync connector then puts these logs into hdfs</li>
  <li>Hive is used over the hdfs data to analyze (e.g. number of accesses group by IP address etc)</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>While I can arrange the nginx logs in the format that would be required by the hive metastore (space or comma separated required fields only), I was wondering if this could be done without touching the nginx log format by</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>using converter similar to org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter</li>
  <li>using single message transforms </li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>both of the approaches would require a custom implementation, and there is very little documentation about how one would go about doing the same.</p>
  
  <p>Which one would be the right approach do achieve this? and are there any examples available for parsing nginx logs output/any source data while it is being written to a topic using kafka connect. I am using standalone file connector.</p>