In today's fast-paced digital world, stale data is more than just an annoyance—it's a liability. When your sales team sees an old customer record, your e-commerce site shows the wrong stock level, or your analytics dashboard is 24 hours behind, you're making decisions based on the past, not the present. The traditional solution? Nightly batch jobs that are slow, brittle, and guarantee your data is always out of date.
There's a better way. By embracing an event-driven approach, you can turn your database—the very heart of your application—into a source of real-time business intelligence. Imagine instantly updating your CRM, re-indexing search results, or notifying a downstream service the very moment a record changes.
This isn't a futuristic concept; it's a practical solution you can implement today. Let's explore how to bridge the gap from a raw database change to a valuable business action using Triggers.do.
Most businesses run on multiple, specialized systems: a production database (like PostgreSQL or MySQL), a CRM (like Salesforce), a search service (like Elasticsearch), and a data warehouse (like BigQuery). Keeping these systems synchronized is a constant challenge.
The common approach involves batch processing—running scripts on a schedule (e.g., every hour or once a day) to query for changes and push them to other systems.
This method is fraught with problems:
The solution is to stop asking the database what's new and instead have the database tell you what's happening, as it happens.
Change Data Capture (CDC) is a modern technique for tracking row-level changes in a database (inserts, updates, and deletes) in real-time. Instead of querying the data itself, CDC tools tap into the database's transaction log—a highly efficient, built-in ledger of every change.
These change events are then streamed to a message bus like Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, or a cloud service like AWS Kinesis. This creates a real-time feed of every single thing happening in your database.
But a raw data feed is just noise. To turn it into action, you need a smart orchestrator that can listen to this stream, understand what each event means, and trigger the appropriate business logic.
This is where Triggers.do shines.
Triggers.do is an event-driven automation platform designed to connect real-time events to your workflows. By positioning Triggers.do as the consumer of your CDC event stream, you can create powerful, real-time automation with surprising simplicity.
Here's how it works:
First, you connect Triggers.do to your event source. This can be virtually any system, but for our use case, it would be the message queue (e.g., Kafka) that's receiving the CDC events from your database.
A busy database generates thousands of events. You don't care about all of them. Triggers.do's powerful filtering engine lets you pinpoint the exact events that should initiate a workflow. You can filter based on the database, the table, the type of operation (INSERT, UPDATE), or even the specific data within the change.
For example, you could create a filter that only matches when the status column of the orders table is updated to 'shipped'.
Once a filtered event is received, Triggers.do initiates a predefined workflow, passing along crucial data from the event itself. The possibilities are endless:
Let's see what this looks like in practice.
import { Trigger } from 'triggers.do';
// This trigger activates a workflow whenever a user's subscription
// status is updated to 'canceled' in the main database.
// Assumes CDC events are published to a 'db_changes' message queue.
const userCanceledSubscriptionTrigger = new Trigger({
// Listen to the stream of database change events
event: 'kafka.topic.db_changes',
// Filter for updates to the 'users' table where the status becomes 'canceled'
filter: `
data.table === 'users' &&
data.operation === 'UPDATE' &&
data.after.subscription_status === 'canceled'
`,
// Start the 'CustomerOffboarding' workflow
action: {
workflow: 'CustomerOffboarding',
inputs: {
userId: '{{data.after.id}}',
userEmail: '{{data.after.email}}',
cancelDate: '{{event.timestamp}}'
}
}
});
// Activate the trigger to start listening for events
await userCanceledSubscriptionTrigger.activate();
In this example, Triggers.do listens to a Kafka topic. It ignores every event except for updates to the users table where a subscription is canceled. When that specific event occurs, it instantly starts a CustomerOffboarding workflow, passing the user's ID and email to be used in subsequent steps like revoking access or sending a final survey.
Your core application didn't need to do anything other than update a single row in the database. Triggers.do handled the rest.
Q: What is an event trigger?
A: An event trigger is a predefined condition that, when met, automatically initiates a workflow. It acts as the starting point for automation, reacting to events like a new user signing up, a payment being processed, a support ticket being created, or in this case, a database record changing.
Q: What kind of event sources can I connect to Triggers.do?
A: You can connect virtually any event source, including webhooks from SaaS platforms (like Stripe or Shopify), messages from pub/sub systems (like Kafka or RabbitMQ), database changes, or custom events sent directly from your own applications via our API.
Q: How do I filter which events start a workflow?
A: Triggers.do provides a powerful filtering engine. You can define specific conditions based on the event payload data, such as amount > 100, status === 'completed', or data.table === 'users', ensuring that workflows only run for the exact events you care about.
By combining Change Data Capture with Triggers.do, you can build systems that are not only efficient and scalable but also incredibly responsive. You can finally break free from the limitations of batch processing and start automating at the speed of your business.
Ready to turn your database changes into business actions? Explore Triggers.do and activate your first workflow today.