You are building a system for a retail store selling products to customers.

AGlobalKTableis a replicated, read-only table available in full on all instances. It's best forreference or lookup datasetssuch as:

Product catalog

Customer profiles

Warehouse inventory

FromKafka Streams Developer Guide:

“Use GlobalKTable when you need to perform joins using non-partition-aligned reference data that's small enough to replicate.”

Purchases and transactions are high-throughput, time-sensitive streams, not static reference data.