Fauna adds support for Change Data Capture
Today, we're excited to announce event feeds as our first feature that brings Change Data Capture (CDC) capabilities to Fauna. Event feeds are the first in a series of features that will enable full support for a range of CDC use cases, ensuring your applications can stay in sync with up-to-date information while also providing historical change tracking.
Event feeds will be available soon in beta for the Pro and Enterprise plans - please contact us today to get started.
"Fauna’s event feeds will allow us to integrate Elastic for full-text search with operational data in Fauna in a serverless fashion, eliminating the need for complex infrastructure management," shared Tayler Kemsley, Senior Software Engineer at Skylark. "This will streamline tasks like organizing media files, generating multiple formats, and handling asset management, making our operations more efficient and scalable. This architecture will not only reduce overhead but also improve the speed at which we can deliver new features to our customers."
Event feeds complement Fauna’s event streaming capabilities, which tracks changes to specific sets of documents or fields and emits events whenever a tracked change occurs – empowering developers to build dynamic, real-time applications.
About Event Feeds
Event feeds allow you to query changes (create, update, delete) in a database container, letting applications process data at their own pace through a queryable, persistent history of changes. Applications can consume this change data incrementally, giving them more control over the rate at which they process these changes. This is ideal for synchronizing large datasets with a data warehouse or maintaining audit logs.
Whether pushing events to microservices or pulling historical snapshots, Fauna now supports both; developers can use pull-based querying with event feeds alongside the push-based, real-time updates of event streams. For example, while an event stream delivers real-time updates, an event feed lets you query a specific window of past changes, offering flexibility in managing your data.
Empowering Your Applications with Change Data Capture
Event feeds unlock a wide range of use cases across industries, helping businesses maintain a coherent, accurate view of their data. With Fauna, you can achieve all of this while maintaining a 100% serverless architecture, eliminating operational complexity and scaling effortlessly.
Here’s how event feeds can help you:
- Pub-Sub & Asynchronous Messaging: Use Fauna as a message broker to trigger updates in external systems, such as updating downstream services including message queues like Kafka or search engines like Algolia.
- Real-time Reporting & Analytics: Feed your analytics pipelines with live changes from your database, enabling up-to-the-second reporting and insights.
- Audit Logging & Compliance: Keep a full history of all data changes for audit purposes or compliance with industry regulations, including the ability to query these changes on demand.
Looking Ahead: More to Come in Full CDC
Event feeds are just the beginning. Over the coming months, Fauna will continue to expand its CDC capabilities by introducing two more features:
- Notifications: Enable applications to react to changes instantly, with even more granular control over the change events you're notified about.
- Snapshot Exports: Export transactionally consistent snapshots of your data, useful for seeding analytics platforms or backup solutions.
Getting Started with Event Feeds
Whether extending an existing Fauna-based application or building something new, the flexibility and power of event feeds will provide unparalleled support for your real-time data needs.
Ready to get started? Event feeds are available in beta for Pro and Enterprise customers - please contact us for more information. Check out the event feeds documentation for a step-by-step guide, join our Discord community for support, and sign up for an account.
If you enjoyed our blog, and want to work on systems and challenges related to globally distributed systems, and serverless databases, Fauna is hiring
Subscribe to Fauna's newsletter
Get latest blog posts, development tips & tricks, and latest learning material delivered right to your inbox.