Kai Wähner asks a question I hadn’t thought about:
Can and should Apache Kafka replace a database? How long can and should I store data in Kafka? How can I query and process data in Kafka? These are common questions that come up more and more. Short answers like “Yes” or “It depends” are not good enough for you? Then this read is for you! This blog post explains the idea behind databases and different features like storage, queries, and transactions to evaluate when Kafka is a good fit and when it is not.
This is an interesting review of the Kafka ecosystem and shows that Apache Kafka really does blur the lines regarding what is a database.