When it comes to your database architecture, complexity can quickly lead to a drag on your productivity, frustration for developers, and less time to focus on innovation. This complexity manifests in many different ways, such as the need to switch between languages and frameworks, which slows down individual developers and makes it hard for teams to share skills. Additionally, schema changes take longer to deploy than building new features, leaving teams with a tough choice: adapt to an unsuitable schema or go through a painful process of changing it. This can lead to a kind of "tax" on innovation, which we call the Data and Innovation Recurring Tax (DIRT).