CDC

Change Data Capture

Track inserts/updates/deletes at the source for incremental pipelines.

When you'd see it: Data engineering and integration, when one system has to stay in near-real-time sync with changes in another.

Why it matters: CDC streams only the rows that changed instead of recopying whole tables, which makes syncing large datasets cheap and timely. It is the engine behind a lot of real-time analytics and replication.