For non-trivial amounts of data you should combine event sourcing with snapshots - i.e. a somewhat up-to-date materialized view/DB table - so you don't have to

For non-trivial amounts of data you should combine event sourcing with snapshots - i.e. a somewhat up-to-date materialized view/DB table - so you don't have to start for 0. At that point you can delete older events or move them to cold storage. A valid question then is: "what do you gain over just using the table"? You gain a well-described model of your business domain, with very clear actions about what should happen on which real-world event, and an audit log. Whether that's worth it depend on your use case. Secondary benefits include easily being able to share events for new apps or use-cases, business analysts really like them, and making it unlikely things go wrong because data is in an inconsistent state.