Re:What every software engineer should know about Apache Kafka
by wpietri on Sunday May 17, 2020 @09:51AM
(#23211973)
Thanks, this is the take I was looking for.
I've definitely seen table-focused projects that really struggle because they need to be thinking in stream-focused terms. That's especially true in the age of mobile hardware. E.g., you want to take your web-focused app and have it run on mobile devices with imperfect connectivity so people in the field can use it, table-only thinking is a pain. It's much easier to reconcile event streams than tables.
Sure you can't expect a stream-oriented tool to do everything an SQL database does. But the reverse is true as well. If we threw out every tool because people unthinkingly used it for the wrong job, we wouldn't have many tools left.
I've definitely seen table-focused projects that really struggle because they need to be thinking in stream-focused terms. That's especially true in the age of mobile hardware. E.g., you want to take your web-focused app and have it run on mobile devices with imperfect connectivity so people in the field can use it, table-only thinking is a pain. It's much easier to reconcile event streams than tables.
Sure you can't expect a stream-oriented tool to do everything an SQL database does. But the reverse is true as well. If we threw out every tool because people unthinkingly used it for the wrong job, we wouldn't have many tools left.