I've built an interactive demo for CDC to help explain how it works.
The app currently shows the transaction log-based and query-based CDC approaches.
Change Data Capture (CDC) is a design pattern that tracks changes (inserts, updates, deletes) in a database and makes those changes available to downstream systems in real-time or near real-time.
CDC is super useful for a variety of use cases:
- Real-time data replication between operational databases and data warehouses or lakehouses
- Keeping analytics systems up to date without full batch reloads
- Synchronizing data across microservices or distributed systems
- Feeding event-driven architectures by turning database changes into event streams
- Maintaining materialized views or derived tables with fresh data
- Simplifying ETL/ELT pipelines by processing only changed records
And many more!
