Publishing with Apache Kafka at The New York Times
> Traditionally, databases have been used as the source of truth ... [but] can be difficult to manage in the long run. First, it’s often tricky to change the schema of a database. Adding and removing fields is not too hard, but more fundamental schema changes can be difficult to organize without downtime.<p>This argument sounds self-contradicting. Kafka doesn't let you change its schema at all! At least postgres gives you the option.<p>It seems that the author is excited about having a single source of truth that doesn't change, and didn't realize that he could do that with a database, if he just never used the schema-changing features.<p>Am I missing something? It seems like the author could be totally happy with a bunch of derived postgres databases sitting in front of a "source of truth" database, where he never changes the source of truth database's schema.<p>Why use kafka?