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Yeah... Not happening when you have scores of clients running down your database.

The reason message queue systems exist is scale. Good luck sending a notification at 9am to your 3 million users and keeping your database alive in the sudden influx of activity. You need to queue that load.

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Kafka is itself a database. Sending a message requires what is essentially a database insert. You're still doing a DB commit either way.

It's more of a commit log/write-ahead log/replication stream than a DBMS - consider that DBMSs typically include these in addition to their primary storage.

It's clearly not a full blown database product, but it's still got the core elements of a database. Your data is getting replicated to multiple instances, written to disk, and an index is created for quick lookup.

It's just the table that's getting is essentially append only (excepting the cleanup processes it supports).

My point was more about the two having separate use cases - but Kafka handles write throughput much easier compared to an RDBMS due to lack of transactions and not needing to manipulate the primary table data structures.

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