Microservice architectures are an emerging industrial approach to build large scale and event-based systems. In this architectural style, an application is functionally partitioned into several small and autonomous building blocks, so-called microservices, communicating and exchanging data with each other via events.

By pursuing a model where fault isolation is enforced at microservice level, each microservice manages their own database, thus database systems are not shared across microservices. Developers end up encoding substantial data management logic in the application-tier and encountering a series of challenges on enforcing data integrity and maintaining data consistency across microservices.

In this vision paper, we argue that there is a need to rethink how database systems can better support microservices and relieve the burden of handling complex data management tasks faced by programmers. We envision the design and research opportunities for a novel distributed database management system targeted at event-driven microservices.