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Comment by zkmon

7 days ago

Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.

24 comments

zkmon

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spyspy  7 days ago

I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`

  • Romario77  7 days ago

    pull vs push. Plus if you start storing the last timestamp so you only select the delta and if you start sharding your db and dealing with complexities of having different time on different tables/replication issues it quickly becomes evident that Kafka is better in this regard.

    But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need streaming. But for pull based apps you design your architecture differently, some things are a lot easier than it is with DB, some things are harder.

  • fatal94  7 days ago

    Sure, if you're working on a small homelab with minimal to no processing volume.

    The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of Kafka.

    • devnull3  7 days ago

      I think there is a wide spectrum between small-homelab and google scale.

      I was surprised how far sqlite goes with some sharding on modern SSDs for those in-between scale services/saas

      6 replies →

    • raverbashing  7 days ago

      "Any kind of scale" No, there's a long way of better and more straightforward solutions than the simple SELECT

      (SELECT * from EVENTS where TIMESTAMP > LAST_TS LIMIT 50) for example

  • devnull3  7 days ago

    That is exactly what I am doing with sqlite.

    Have a table level seqno as monotonically increasing number stamped for every mutation. When a subscriber connects it asks for rows > Subscriber's seqno-last-handled.