* Produces change events with a *very low delay* while avoiding increased CPU usage required for frequent polling. For example, for MySQL or PostgreSQL, the delay is in the millisecond range.
* Requires *no changes to your data model*, such as a "Last Updated" column.
* Can *capture deletes*.
* Can *capture old record state and additional metadata* such as transaction ID and causing query, depending on the database's capabilities and configuration.
link:https://debezium.io/blog/2018/07/19/advantages-of-log-based-change-data-capture/[Five Advantages of Log-Based Change Data Capture] is a blog post that provides more details.
* *Snapshots:* optionally, an initial snapshot of a database's current state can be taken if a connector is started and not all logs still exist. Typically, this is the case when the database has been running for some time and has discarded transaction logs that are no longer needed for transaction recovery or replication. There are different modes for performing snapshots, including support for _incremental_ snapshots, which can be triggered at connector runtime. For more details, see the documentation for the connector that you are using.
* Ready-to-use *message transformations* for message routing, filtering, event flattening, and more; see xref:transformations/index.adoc[Transformations] for an overview of all the SMTs coming with {prodname}.
For more information about the SMTs that {prodname} provides, see xref:applying-transformations-to-modify-messages-exchanged-with-kafka[Applying transformations to modify messages exchanged with Apache Kafka].
See the xref:{link-connectors}[connector documentation] for a list of all supported databases and detailed information about the features and configuration options of each connector.
{prodname} can also be used as xref:development/engine.adoc[library embedded] into your JVM-based applications;
via xref:operations/debezium-server.adoc[Debezium Server], you can emit change events to messaging infrastructure like Amazon Kinesis, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Apache Pulsar, etc.