Kafka Is Not a Database

Re:Kafka Is Not a Database by georgewfraser on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:59PM (#25349821)

That post explains that there are scenarios where it makes sense to store data permanently in Kafka. "Kafka is Not a Database" makes a different point, which is that Kafka doesn't solve any of the hard transaction-processing problems that database systems do, so it's not an alternative to a traditional DBMS. This is not a straw man---Confluent advocates for "turning the database inside out" all over their marketing materials and conference talks.

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Re:Kafka Is Not a Database by hitekker on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @10:36AM (#25359604)

Indeed. The HN community has been quite negative on Confluent marketing Kafka as a database.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206566

Apache Kafka also doesn’t refer to itself as a database in its own documentation:

https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/#introduction

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Re:Kafka Is Not a Database by cfontes on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:06PM (#25349908)

It actually does with |Exactly-once Semantics| in fact I've been using as the single source of truth in a cash management system for almost 2 years without a single issue related to transactions.

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Re:Kafka Is Not a Database by jashmatthews on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:36PM (#25350241)

How do you deal with side effects outside of the Kafka cluster?

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Re:Kafka Is Not a Database by theptip on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:51PM (#25350425)

Short answer: you write your consumer's state into the same DB as you're writing the side-effects to, in the same transaction.

Long answer: say your consumer is a service with a SQL DB -- if you want to process Event(offset=123), you need to 1. start a transaction, 2. write a record in your DB logging that you've consumed offset=123, 3. write your data for the side-effect, 4. commit your transaction. (Reverse 2 and 3 if you prefer; it shouldn't make a difference). If your side-effect write fails (say your DB goes down) then your transaction will be broken, your side-effect won't be readable outside the transaction, and the update to the consumer offset pointer also won't get persisted. Next loop around on your consumer's event loop, you'll start at the same offset and retry the same transaction.

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Re:Kafka Is Not a Database by arafsheikh on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @03:09PM (#25350664)

Persisting message offsets in DB has its own challenges. The apps become tightly coupled with a specific Kafka cluster and that makes it difficult to swap clusters in case of a failover event.

If you expect apps to persist offsets then it’s important to have a mechanism/process to safely reset the app state in DB when the stored offset doesn’t make sense.

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Re:Kafka Is Not a Database by wdb on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @05:58PM (#25352712)

Interesting, do you have any resources about how to best handle side effects with message queues (e.g. GCP PubSub)? Trying to find out if its worth the effort, or good practice to allow replay-ability (like from backup) of message and get back to the same state

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Re:Kafka Is Not a Database by arafsheikh on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @10:15PM (#25354917)

Not sure about PubSub, but Kafka doesn’t store messages on disk forever by default. So hydrating the state from a message bus may not be a good idea depending on what you’re doing. I’d say DB is the way to go here.

Don’t have any resources though. I’m only speaking from experience.

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