Apache Kafka is widely recognized as a powerful message broker, log aggregator, and stream processor, but it is not suited to serve as a primary database due to the lack of isolation and the difficulties of managing hard database problems such as dirty reads, phantom reads, and write skew. To handle transactions reliably, traditional OLTP databases should be used alongside Kafka. Materialize offers a solution for creating consistent views from Kafka streams using standard SQL, making it easier to manage real-time data use cases.