CQRS

1. The Incident

The orders database serves everyone, and everyone wants something different from it.

Checkout writes orders. It wants a normalized schema, one where each fact is stored once, with strict validation and transactions; that way nothing invalid ever gets in.

The orders page reads them; to draw one screen it joins six tables: order, items, customer, addresses, shipments, payments. That join costs 300 ms.

The support team wants to search orders by customer name and product; that is text search, and the database does it badly