This blog post was both enjoyable and quick to write, at least according to my standards. It explores a slightly provocative idea: challenging the fundamental assumption that microservices must not share a database to expose data to external services, and examining what breaks when this convention is ignored. As it turns out, quite a lot breaks, but there are also significant benefits, especially when business logic requires consistent data from multiple services.
The post then explains how Materialize can mitigate the coupling introduced by a shared database while preserving the advantages of a simplified data access model. By leveraging materialized views, incremental view maintenance, and decoupled storage and compute, teams can access data across service boundaries while keeping their compute resources isolated and independently scalable.
The original working title was How to Stop Worrying and Use a Single Database for Your Microservicess, but in a brief lapse of attention, it was replaced with the current title.
https://materialize.com/blog/simplify-microservices-shared-database-materialized-views/