How CDC actually works in 2026. Postgres logical replication slots, pgoutput, Debezium, the outbox pattern, and how to fan out changes to Kafka, NATS, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, or your AI pipeline.
Why Polars is the right DataFrame library for production Python in 2026 — lazy execution, Arrow-backed columnar engine, query optimization, the API differences from Pandas, and a pragmatic migration path.
DuckDB has become the embedded analytics engine of 2026. Why it replaces Pandas, where it fits next to Postgres / ClickHouse / Snowflake, the DuckLake extension, and concrete patterns for SaaS, notebooks, and edge analytics.