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