Clickhouse-Postgresql CDC Integration
Here’s a blog-ready English version of your CDC draft, polished for clarity and flow:
Change Data Capture (CDC)
Change Data Capture (CDC) is a method of detecting data changes in a database—such as inserts, updates, and deletes—and delivering these changes to another system in real time.
CDC plays a critical role in microservice architectures, data analytics platforms, and data synchronization scenarios, ensuring that systems stay in sync without heavy database queries.
This article explains the fundamentals of CDC and how it can be implemented using technologies like PostgreSQL, Kafka, Debezium, ClickHouse, and Trino.
Why Use CDC?
In large and complex systems, it’s essential to track data changes and propagate them to other systems efficiently. CDC enables this by:
Ensuring data consistency across multiple systems
Supporting real-time analytics
Enabling system-to-system data integration
Allowing data replication without adding heavy load on the database
Key Technologies in the CDC Pipeline
PostgreSQL
The CDC process often begins with a source database, such as PostgreSQL, where changes occur. PostgreSQL records all modifications (insert, update, delete) in its Write-Ahead Log (WAL).
Through logical replication, these changes can be captured by external tools like Debezium, which then forward them to downstream systems.
Debezium
Debezium is an open-source CDC tool that captures database changes in real time.
It reads from PostgreSQL’s logical replication slots and streams the changes—usually in JSON format—to Apache Kafka.
This makes Debezium a key bridge between the source database and the messaging system.
Apache Kafka
Kafka acts as the central data backbone of the CDC pipeline.
It stores Debezium’s change events in topics, which can then be consumed by multiple downstream services or applications.
Kafka ensures scalability, durability, and distribution of change data across systems.
ClickHouse
Once change data reaches Kafka, it can be ingested into ClickHouse for analytics.
ClickHouse’s columnar storage architecture makes it well-suited for running fast analytical queries on large datasets.
CDC data is typically written from Kafka into ClickHouse via ETL or streaming pipelines, enabling real-time reporting and dashboards.
Trino
Trino (formerly PrestoSQL) enables federated querying across multiple data sources.
In a CDC setup, Trino can combine data from Kafka, ClickHouse, and other systems to provide unified, ad-hoc analytics across live and historical data.
ZooKeeper
ZooKeeper plays a supporting role in distributed systems like Kafka.
It provides coordination, leader election, configuration management, and state tracking, ensuring that Kafka clusters run reliably across multiple nodes.
CDC Workflow
The end-to-end CDC process typically looks like this:
Data Change: A row is inserted, updated, or deleted in PostgreSQL.
WAL Entry: PostgreSQL logs the change in its Write-Ahead Log (WAL).
Debezium Capture: Debezium reads the WAL via logical replication and forwards the event to Kafka.
Kafka Storage: Kafka stores the change event in the appropriate topic.
Downstream Processing: ClickHouse (or other systems) consumes the Kafka events for analytics, reporting, or further transformations.
✅ In summary, CDC provides a powerful way to stream database changes in real time across modern data architectures. By combining PostgreSQL, Debezium, Kafka, ClickHouse, and Trino, organizations can build robust data pipelines for analytics, synchronization, and system integration—without overloading their primary databases.
Do you want me to also add diagrams (architecture flow charts) for your blog post? They would make the CDC pipeline much easier for readers to visualize.