A centralized database can become a bottleneck as a company grows, leading to slow queries, increased engineering complexity, and decreased innovation. A materialized cache, which precomputes query results and stores them for fast access, can help alleviate these issues. By leveraging a construct like ksqlDB, an event streaming database that supports materialized views, companies can scale out multiple caches concurrently, reducing pressure on their databases. With ksqlDB's native Kafka integration, developers can easily replicate this pattern of scaling out distributed caches. The technology allows for the creation of materialized caches that can be queried in real-time, without requiring computation, and provides a clean way to forward change capture events from databases into Kafka. By introducing core building blocks like materialized caches, companies can build powerful streaming apps with a small set of SQL statements.