Change data capture (CDC) is a very powerful technique for pulling database changes out of a system and performing some actions on that data. One of the most popular ways of doing this is to use the database's transaction log to identify changes and then publish those changes directly onto an event bus that can be consumed by other services. This works very well for use cases such as breaking monoliths into microservices but when used for first-class integration between microservices, this leads to puncturing encapsulation and leaking the source service's data layer into the event contract. We've talked about domain scoped events and other techniques that emphasize the importance of having our events model our domain properly. We're seeing some projects use CDC for publishing row-level change events and directly consuming these events in other services. This puncturing of encapsulation with change data capture can be a slippery slope leading to fragile integrations and we would like to call this out with this blip.
