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See how to build event-driven architectures directly on PostgreSQL. Diaa Radwan (Microsoft) explains this approach in his talk “Building Event-Driven Systems with PostgreSQL Logical Replication and Drasi” at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026. Abstract: PostgreSQL’s logical replication captures database changes in real-time, but most developers still rely on external streaming platforms like Kafka for event processing. This session shows you how to build event-driven architectures directly on PostgreSQL using its write-ahead log and Drasi, a CNCF Sandbox project that adds continuous queries and filtering on top of change data capture.
You’ll see a comparison of three CDC approaches: wal2json with custom consumers, Debezium with Kafka, and Drasi with PostgreSQL. I’ll walk through live benchmarks measuring database overhead, end-to-end latency, and lines of code required for each approach. Using a working example, I’ll demonstrate how PostgreSQL captures changes, how Drasi filters them with declarative queries, and how to trigger downstream actions—while monitoring PostgreSQL’s actual CPU and network usage throughout.
You’ll learn when logical replication makes sense for your architecture, how to configure replication slots and publications, how to avoid WAL accumulation issues, and how to choose between different CDC approaches based on your requirements. This session focuses on practical PostgreSQL skills you can apply immediately, whether you’re building on Azure, AWS, or on-premises.
Diaa Radwan is part of the Global Blackbelt team focusing on Open Source databases at Microsoft. He has been supporting and enabling companies across different industry verticals to adopt Open Source technologies in the past 15 years.
► Video chapters:
⏩ 00:00 – Music & introduction
⏩ 00:21 – Three approaches to event streams
⏩ 00:50 – Problems with polling, triggers, and dual writes
⏩ 01:41 – CDC with WAL: the core idea
⏩ 02:16 – Inside the WAL pipeline explained
⏩ 03:05 – Setting up logical replication in Postgres
⏩ 04:07 – Architecture overview: three CDC paths
⏩ 06:01 – Benchmark setup for fair comparison
⏩ 07:52 – Demo: wal2json low-latency streaming
⏩ 11:14 – Demo: Debezium and Kafka trade-offs
⏩ 16:18 – Demo: Drasi filtering and fan-out
⏩ 22:03 – Comparing latency, cost, and complexity
⏩ 24:13 – Production risks: WAL growth and slots
⏩ 25:49 – Choosing the right CDC approach
📕 Everything you need to know about POSETTE: An Event for Postgres can be found at: https://posetteconf.com
✅ Learn more: watch more POSETTE talks: https://aka.ms/posette-playlist
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