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Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source platform for streaming events between systems in real time.

Written by Reflective Data experts · updated Oct 5, 2026

It stores streams of events durably and lets many consumers read them at their own pace. It is the backbone of many real-time data architectures.

Most analytics reporting does not need Kafka, but it matters for high-volume event collection and real-time use cases.

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Batch vs streamingChange data capture (CDC)Real-time analytics

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