CDC Use Cases: 7 Ways to Put CDC to Work

Change Data Capture (CDC) enables real-time propagation of database changes to downstream systems. Log-based CDC, exemplified by Debezium, captures inserts, updates, and deletes from transaction logs with low latency and no impact on source data models. Seven practical use cases are covered: feeding analytics platforms (data warehouses, data lakes, real-time OLAP stores), keeping application caches fresh, syncing full-text search indexes, building audit logs with enriched metadata, powering continuous queries via Apache Flink dynamic tables, implementing the outbox pattern for reliable microservices data exchange, and supporting strangler-fig monolith-to-microservices migrations. Apache Flink is highlighted as a complementary tool for stateful stream processing, filtering, joining, and aggregating CDC event streams across all these scenarios.