Ted - it depends on your domain. More conservative approaches to long lived data protect against data corruption, which generally means snapshots and cold storage.
> On 15 Feb 2016, at 21:31, Ted Swerve <ted.swe...@gmail.com> wrote: > > HI Ben, Sharninder, > > Thanks for your responses, I appreciate it. > > Ben - thanks for the tips on settings. A backup could certainly be a > possibility, although if only with similar durability guarantees, I'm not > sure what the purpose would be? > > Sharninder - yes, we would only be using the logs as forward-only streams - > i.e. picking an offset to read from and moving forwards - and would be > setting retention time to essentially infinite. > > Regards, > Ted. > > On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 5:05 AM, Sharninder Khera <sharnin...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> This topic comes up often on this list. Kafka can be used as a datastore >> if that’s what your application wants with the caveat that Kafka isn’t >> designed to keep data around forever. There is a default retention time >> after which older data gets deleted. The high level consumer essentially >> reads data as a stream and while you can do sort of random access with the >> low level consumer, its not ideal. >> >> >> >>> On 15-Feb-2016, at 10:26 PM, Ted Swerve <ted.swe...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> Hello, >>> >>> Is it viable to use infinite-retention Kafka topics as a master data >>> store? I'm not talking massive volumes of data here, but still >> potentially >>> extending into tens of terabytes. >>> >>> Are there any drawbacks or pitfalls to such an approach? It seems like a >>> compelling design, but there seem to be mixed messages about its >>> suitability for this kind of role. >>> >>> Regards, >>> Ted >> >>