Change Data Capture (CDC) is a process that allows an application to listen for changes to a data store and respond to those events. In this multi-part series on Change Data Capture, we are going to dive into what CDC is, how its implemented, and its ideal use cases. Industry leading companies like Shopify, Capital One, Netflix, Airbnb, and Zendesk have all implemented CDC into their data architectures to expose data from a centralized system to event-driven microservices, build applications that respond to data events in real-time, and maintain data quality and freshness within data warehouses and other downstream consumers of data. With CDC, we can build services to perform actions like updating the data warehouse, notifying the team of a new user, keeping an additional User table in sync with filtered columns for privacy purposes, creating a real-time dashboard of new user activity, capturing change events for audit logging, storing every change in a cloud bucket for historical analytics, and updating an index used for search. CDC gives us efficiency by acting on events as they occur and scalability by leveraging a decoupled event-driven architecture.
