Data engineering·Time and correctness in streams
the same topic can be read as a log of every change or collapsed into a table of current values, and which one you want depends on the question.
Stream-table duality
Also calledchangelog duality, table-stream equivalence
The observation that a table is the accumulated result of a stream of changes, and a stream is the sequence of differences between successive tables. It stops being an abstraction the first time you need current state from a change feed, or history from a snapshot table, and it is the idea behind compacted topics and materialised streaming views. Naming it is what makes 'should this be a table or a topic' answerable rather than stylistic.