The Event Sourcing Pattern
Joe has a habit whenever he did some transaction by his Debit card he used to write them in his Personal Diary so he can track his transactions. Joe is not a technology savvy and not able to check account statements online.
At the month end, his bank SMS him his current balance but he immediately notices a discrepancy between current savings what bank shows and as per his calculation based on the Diary. He immediately calls Bank helpline and arguing about the discrepancy. Then the bank sends him an Account statement with all transactions recorded.
When he is trying to match transaction records with his diary he understood one transaction not in the Diary as that day he was so sick, he thought it to write it next day but somehow forgot.
But the question is what we can extract from this story?
If we look minutely we discover one fact that Bank always stores all the events/transactions happens on the Account. Like Account creation, credit, debit etc. and the current balance is nothing but the outcome of those transactions. So what I meant to say is that account balance is not a fixed column in a database rather than it is a derivative/outcome of the transactions/events what were applied on the Account.We called it Event Sourcing.
Now think what we generally do in software if we credit or debit any amount we just add or subtract that amount from current balance and update the account with new balance right.
So we have the current state but lost the information how that state is achieved some system uses Audit trail still it is not fully deterministic. So anytime anyone challenges the system this is not the desired system state we don’t have any solid proof other than pleaded to them that system can not be wrong. But if you maintain that history or cause of the state changed like Bank then you just give them the History and asking to check -- a solid way to store proofs.
This is a very common story may anyone of us gone through the same and then look the Account statement for doubt clearing.
Technically what is Even Sourcing?
Event Sourcing is a technique by that we store all the changes of application state as a sequence of events. we can rebuild the state anytime from those events, also can query on the events to construct the desired state.
So the two key benefits are
1.we store all the events in a sequence which enables huge opportunities.
2.The state is the derivative of events so we don’t have to maintain state in the database rather we can programmatically derive state based on the event.
Now this opens a new direction that we don’t have to persist state rather we can derive state and it bring many advantages I will talk about 5 such advantages.
- State Rebuild : As we stores every event applies on an application object, we can create a blank /initial application object and apply every event in the same sequence it applied will bring the same state, so anywhere any point of time we can rebuild a state from events. So systems must have a mechanism to apply event, Then you can rebuild a state if the state is blown up for some reason. One may argue if your application state derives from millions of events applied on it, so computing all events may take time and also storing all events need a big storage area. but the fact is nowadays memory are really cheap also we can have TB of in memory space so computation is also faster, alternatively, we can store snapshot i.e milestone of the state and apply event and rebuild state from latest snapshot.
2. Temporal Query : Event sourcing is perfect for Auditors. Business analysis team always want to see the past state so they can compare the growth or loss or any valuable statistical data so they need the flexibility to query the system in all possible way to collect statistical data. So If system has a feature to build the past state by passing parameters then analyst team will be delighted and the System which maintains all the state they can easily rebuild /compute the state by the parameters provide by the analyst team say analyst want to see the Account details for 10th December 2016, by event sourcing we can fetch all events till 10 the December and apply them in sequence to build the state and return the result to analysts -- easy job isn’t it.
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3. Comparing State : Sometimes in a complex system, you need to know if events were applied in different ways what would be the outcome and how much deviation it cause from the current state say, A bank saving account interest rate is 8% previously it was 8.5. Now if the bank wants to know due to the decrease of the interest what is the actual amount bank benefits so they will replay events of 8.5 percents in all accounts and compare the state with current state to know the actual benefits although it is not very easy to implement but we can.
4. Debugging State : Suppose there is a bug in production system and we need to debug why the bug happens by event sourcing it is very easy like copy the Account in Dev environment then change the Log level to Debug and apply event one by one in the sequence and check the outcome is predicted or not ,if not then found the Event and check how it applies to change the application state to found the defect.
5. Future Prediction : In some Business domain it is important task to analysis what will be outcome if we take some business decision, if the outcome is successful they will take the decision,But in a naked eye it is impossible to predict the application state as different services are interlinked with each other and based on one event they can change, dependent services are subscribed to certain events when that event occurs they take action on basis of event value. say A bank’s stock share worth is 8 INR but bank analysis team predict within 1 month it will be increased to 12 INR and they have moreover 30K stocks are public so analysis team wants to know what will be the effects of the application state if stock worth is 12 INR so they will run some ad-hoc future events on top of current state based on two criteria.
Taking per stock as 12 INR
Taking per stock as 8 INR
Then compare two application states to find out what are the effect of this stock value increase for each interlinked services.
Conclusion : Some systems are inherently Event sourced like Version control (GIT), Banking application, Order Tracking application etc. but we can implement the same in general system also.Using Event sourcing you can easily back and forth you application state by replaying events and state cloning into any environment is just a matter of time but the Irony is, This pattern not used broadly in industry.
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