There are companies that fit the following operational niche: * Need to run Kafka (for domain-specific reasons) * Need a relational database, but not necessar

There are companies that fit the following operational niche: * Need to run Kafka (for domain-specific reasons) * Need a relational database, but not necessarily a large or performant one A project that lets you "buy a Kafka cluster, get the relational database free" is strictly simpler and cheaper to operate (in theory...) compared to operating both a Kafka cluster and a traditional relational database.