[conormccarter]

I fully agree in spirit, but in practice, read-replica's have some edge cases that are hard to control for. Namely, the incentives aren't fully aligned between the database host and consumer, and that dynamic can lead to some difficult resourcing decisions for the DB host. Whereas an API can be rate limited or underlying API queries can be optimized (however frustrating that might be for consumers).

The CDC stream option you flagged is more viable in my (admittedly biased) opinion. At my company (Prequel) our entire pitch is basically "you should give your customer's a live replica of their data in whatever data platform they want it in" (and let us handle the cross-platform compatibility & multi-tenant DB challenges).

I think this problem could also be a killer use case for Open Table Formats, where the read-replica architecture can be mirrored but the cost of reader compute can be assumed by the data consumer.

To your point, this is only going to be more important with what will likely be a dramatic increase in AI agent data consumption.