[divtxt]

You're quite right. Switching from a db to a log as the "master" loses the simplicity of the app-to-db model.

As the article says: "For now, a better option is to extract the log from a database" - i.e you use some tooling to generate a log from the db.

Indeed, you can now see tools that go in this direction usually by using the replication stream. (eg https://github.com/shyiko/mysql-binlog-connector-java and https://github.com/xstevens/decoderbufs)