The next major release of Tributary will support Avro, Protobuf and JSON along with the Schema Registry it will also bring the ability to write to Kafka with transactions.

But really you should get excited for DuckDB Labs to build out materialized views. Materialized views where you can ingest more streaming data to update aggregates. This way you could just keep pushing rows through aggregates from Kafka.

It is going to be a POWER HOUSE for streaming analytics.

Contact DuckDB Labs if you want to sponsor the work on materialized views: https://duckdb.org/roadmap

Oh yes!! I've seen this a couple times. I am far from an expert in tributary so please take with a grain of salt.

Based on the tributary documentation, I understand that tributary embeds kafka consumers into duckdb. This makes duckdb the main process that you run to perform consumption. I think that this makes creating stream processing POCs very accessible. It looks like it is quite easy to start streaming data into duckdb. What I don't see is a full story around Devops, operations, testing, configuration as code etc.

SQLFlow is a service that embeds DuckDB as the storage and processing brains. Because of this, we're able to offer metrics, testing utilities, pipelines as code, and all the other DevOps utilities that are necessary to run a huge number of streaming instances 24x7. SQLFlow was created as a tool that I wish I had to for simple stream processing in production in high availability contexts :)