PostgreSQL is an open source relational database. Kafka is an open source log-based messaging system. Because both systems are powerful and flexible, they’re devouring whole categories of infrastructure. And they’re even better together. In this talk, you’ll learn about commit logs and how that fundamental data structure underlies both PostgreSQL and Kafka. We’ll use that basis to understand what Kafka is, what advantages it has over traditional messaging systems, and why it’s perfect for modeling database tables as streams. From there, we’ll introduce the concept of change data capture (CDC) and run a live demo of Bottled Water, an open source CDC pipeline, watching INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations in PostgreSQL stream into Kafka. We’ll wrap up with a discussion of use cases for this pipeline: messaging between systems with transactional guarantees, transmitting database changes to a data warehouse, and stream processing.