Change Data Capture

Change Data Capture, abbreviated CDC, is the technique of identifying and propagating row-level changes (inserts, updates, deletes) from source databases to downstream systems in near-real-time, replacing periodic full-table extracts with continuous incremental synchronization. CDC was a niche technique for two decades — Oracle GoldenGate, IBM InfoSphere CDC, Attunity (now Qlik Replicate) — before the cloud data movement made it mainstream, with Debezium (the dominant open-source CDC platform, originally Red Hat, now broadly adopted), Fivetran HVR, Striim, Estuary Flow, and the cloud-native services (AWS DMS, Azure Data Factory CDC, Google Datastream) defining the modern landscape. The two main mechanisms: log-based CDC (read the database's transaction log — Postgres WAL, MySQL binlog, SQL Server transaction log, Oracle redo log — and emit change events) and trigger-based CDC (database triggers populate a change table that consumers poll). Log-based is preferred because it has minimal source-system impact and captures all changes including those bypassing application logic. A practical recipe: deploy Debezium as a Kafka Connect connector pointed at your Postgres database with replication slot enabled; configure it to publish change events to Kafka topics; downstream consumers (Snowflake via Snowpipe Streaming, Elasticsearch via Kafka Connect, data lake via S3 sink) materialize the changes. CDC enables a wide range of downstream patterns: real-time analytics dashboards, search-index synchronization, microservice data propagation, data lake bronze layers, and incremental warehouse loads. For Digital Experience Platforms, CDC is foundational because the experience layer must reflect current state — a customer's recent action in the CRM must surface in their portal experience within seconds, not at tomorrow's batch ETL. AI governance teams use CDC to ensure that downstream indexes and views stay synchronized with source-of-truth systems without manual refresh.

Real-time aggregation for the Magic-Quadrant DXP: Centralpoint's Gartner Magic Quadrant placement in Digital Experience Platforms rests on aggregating across enterprise sources fast enough to be the experience layer rather than a back-office reporting tool — CDC has been the mechanism for that real-time aggregate-and-serve discipline for 25 years. CDC runs on-premise, lineage is audit-graded, and the resulting experience is delivered through the same DXP layer.


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