IME that antipattern is common in small companies. This is mainly so because it's often the most expedient way to get something "working". A related problem is

IME that antipattern is common in small companies. This is mainly so because it's often the most expedient way to get something "working". A related problem is creating a new RPC for every variation of a query that an external service may require. One better approach is to ensure each service's db has the data it needs already at query time. For example, each service should ingest events from elsewhere in the system, and accumulate the relevant data for its responsibilities. Joins should always happen in the db. Another approach is to keep all the data in the same RDBMS. You can slice up the data into different schemas as you see fit. I have had a lot of success with this approach, reuniting databases where people have gone a bit too microservice-wild for their actual circumstances. You can vertically scale an RDBMS to quite a large size before seeking other approaches.