Thanks for your reply! I'd like to learn from this by clarifying a few points you've made, if you don't mind? I definitely agree that sharing a database is not an ideal end result in many/most circumstances, and your point about being tethered to the same DB engine is a good one. Would you say that there are circumstances where the complexity of messaging to share the source of truth's data overshadows the cons of sharing the database? In a purist's world, a microservice would never need data from another service (that cannot be passed down in the initial payload), but it seems like it is pretty common that tech debt is accrued when this no longer becomes the case? This seems to be one of the most common pitfalls of the architecture, would you agree? I'm curious what you feel about the second set of options for sharing copies of data as an alternative to sharing the entire database, or as an alternative to spinning up messaging to get at data that belongs to another service? Thanks again for weighing in!