Athena is a lightweight Change Data Capture (CDC) solution that streams changes from Microsoft SQL Server to Apache Kafka. Built in Golang, it supports SASL-authenticated Kafka brokers and provides a straightforward setup experience. Unlike alternatives such as Debezium, which can be complex to configure and manage. Athena offers greater simplicity and operational ease. It automatically manages CDC setups, publishes database changes to a single Kafka topic, and delivers a clean, intuitive event format that is easy for downstream consumers to understand and process.

Calling a SQL to streaming database tool Athena is bonkers bad naming.

https://aws.amazon.com/athena/

If you have enough data to actually need to use Kafka, “simplicity” probably leaves too much out.

For MySQL: https://github.com/zendesk/maxwell

We use this to clear application row-level caches in JPA. We didn't really need Kafka either, we stream it ActiveMQ with a customer producer. Works brilliantly