Is a Kafka topic the equivalent of a database or a table within a database?

Data Science, AI and ML
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#1

Kafka topic is a stream of events
Not like a database table which is more like a persistent storage

Kafka is part of a event based system and transmits events from producer to one or more consumers. Using the stream data, logic can be implemented at consumer end to recreate the event sequence or analyse history of events etc

In any case, you would require a persistent storage like table to store the resultant data out of the analysis you do on a Kafka topic stream