You aren't a DBA. You're a paramedic for a closed-source replication engine

We all know the drill. You inherit a pipeline built on a legacy CDC tool. It’s been running for months. Nobody on the team actually knows how to configure it—the person who set it up left two years ago. The documentation is a mix of outdated PDFs and a single comment in a ticket: “don’t touch the trail files”. Then someone makes a seemingly innocent change to the source schema. A column rename. Nothing major. Suddenly, replication is hours behind. The alert channels light up. You SSH into the server, tail the logs, and find yourself staring at a proprietary error message that might as well be in Latin. Sound familiar? The Hidden Tax of “Enterprise” CDC I’ve worked with most of the major replication tools out there. And while they’re technically capable, they come with a cost that rarely shows up in the license fee: 🔴 Black‑box internals When something breaks, you’re not debugging—you’re guessing. The logs tell you what happened, but rarely why. 🔴 Schema drift = manual labour . A simple