The text discusses building real-time interactive queries on large datasets using Apache Kafka and Rockset, a scalable SQL search and analytics engine. It highlights the benefits of using Kafka as an event streaming platform for mission-critical infrastructures and core operations platforms, leveraging its ability to handle massive volumes of data in real-time. The article showcases how Rockset can be used to perform interactive analytics on top of Apache Kafka, providing low-latency queries and fast SQL queries on raw data coming from Kafka through an API. It also demonstrates how to integrate Kafka with other valuable components like Confluent Schema Registry and ksqlDB for continuous stream processing on data streams using simple SQL commands. The text emphasizes the importance of leveraging cloud elasticity for distributed query processing, ensuring reliable performance at scale without managing shards or servers. Finally, it showcases a step-by-step example of creating a real-time monitoring dashboard on a Twitter JSON feed in Kafka, joined with more detailed company information from Nasdaq, and connected to Redash for interactive visualization.