If you're using Apache Kafka and building stream-processing applications, ksqlDB is a great framework for writing simple applications using SQL-like statements. ksqlDB is not a traditional SQL database. However, it allows you to use lightweight SQL-like statements to build new Kafka streams or tables on top of the existing Kafka topics. The queries can pull data, similar to reading from a traditional database, or push results to the application when incremental changes occur. You can choose to run it as a standalone server natively as part of your existing Apache Kafka installation or as a fully managed service on Confluent Cloud. We're using ksqlDB in simple data-processing use cases. In more complex use cases, where an application requires programming code beyond algebraic SQL queries, we continue to use data-processing frameworks such as Apache Spark or Apache Flink on top of Kafka. We recommend experimenting with ksqlDB in scenarios where the simplicity of the application allows it.
