ES is at the core of the system where it is being used, so there really is no in-between option here. I've built two production ES systems and I was toying with few ideas to make it more DX friendly by using json as core of any entity/object and using json patch for events but in the end it made no sense because ES must be absolutely strict on schema, which evolves over time, and data types. You must be able to process events that might be a decade old and for objects that no longer exist. There is no wiggle room. Hence the aforementioned overhead. I do not know MartenDb but in essence every db today uses ES as that is how transactions work, except the event log is discarded after the commit. But either way, ES on db level is meaningless, except maybe being able to use it as actual log for auditing purposes but you won't be able to process it by any means as schema changes over time and db schema has little to do with the application itself anyway.