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Showing posts with the label change data capture

Emit structured Postgres data change events with wal2json

A common thing I see in an enterprise system is that when an end-user does some action, say add a user, the underlying web of subsystems adds the user to multiple databases in separate transactions. Each of these transactions may happen in varying order and, even worse, can fail, leaving the system in an inconsistent state. A better way could be to write the user data to some main database and then other subsystems like search indexes, pull/push the data to other interested parties, thus eliminating the need for multiple end-user originating boundary transactions. That's the theory part; how about a technical solution. The idea of this post came from the koodia pinnan alla podcast about event-driven systems and CDC . One of the discussion topics in the show is emitting events from Postgres transaction logs.  I built an utterly simple change emitter and reader using Postgres with the wal2json transaction decoding plugin and a custom go event parser. I'll stick to the boring ...