Kafka Is Not a Database
Tbh, It&#x27;s a weird blog post coming from the materialize folks, considering they know better.<p>The &quot;event sourced&quot; arch they sketched is missing pieces.
Normaly you&#x27;d have single writer instances that are locked to the corresponding kafka partition, which ensure strong transactional guarantees, IF you need them.<p>Throwing shade for maketings sake is something that they should be above.<p>I mean c&#x27;mon, I&#x27;d argue that Postgres enhanced with Materialize isn&#x27;t a database anymore either, but in a good sense!<p>It&#x27;s building material. A hybrid between MQ, DB, backend logic &amp; frontend logic.<p>The reduction in application logic and the increase in reliability you can get from reactive systems is insane.<p>SQL is declarative, reactive Materialize streams are declarative on a whole new level.<p>Once that tech makes it into other parts of computing like the frontend, development will be so much better, less code, less bug, a lot more fun.<p>Imagine that your react component could simply declare all the data it needs from a db, and the system will figure out all the caching and rerendering.<p>So yeah, they have awesome tech with many advantages, so I don&#x27;t get why they bad-mouth other architectures.