Change data capture (CDC) pipelines, despite being an industry standard, are so brittle that they deserve the joking rename 'continuous data corruption' because schema changes on the source database routinely break them.

Reynold jokes that CDC — used industry-wide to replicate transactional data into analytics systems — is so fragile that it should be called "continuous data corruption," since an OLTP schema change routinely breaks the pipeline. ✦ AI generated

Reynold Xin · Latent Space · 2026-06-24 · original ↗

But it's so brittle that, we joke that it's, should be called continuous data corruption, because you might change your schema on your OLTP database, and then the CDC pipeline fails to handle the schema change.

verbatim transcript · starts at 30:37