Building a CQRS/ES web application in Elixir using Phoenix

The good thing is that you can adapt the event store to your performance requirements and do the simplest thing possible in a huge amount of cases.

Well, when you base an argument on a set of known antipatterns, you shouldn't feign surprise when someone points out that you're basing your argument on known antipatterns.

>Additionally, domains are almost never completely understood. Even if they're well understood today, things will change tomorrow. CQRS/ES in your own words is not good when requirements change. Well guess what? That's every system I've ever worked on.

The first point is flat out untrue. There are domains of expertise with literal centuries of knowledge and practice in them. There are many many more with decades. And many manys more with years. Startups measure knowledge in weeks and months. This is not a suitable playground for ES.

Secondly, I didn't say CQRS/ES was unsuitable when requirements change. I said it required a lot more work when the domain was not well understood—and that the work was primarily in understanding the domain.

I've used some combination of these patterns on nearly every system I've worked on for the last 7 years. That spans medical billing, ticketing, public health, the wedding industry, and for the really esoteric, voting software for college life organizations. Here are the rules I've found:

* Keep it simple. Do not try to apply ES to all areas of your software, if you apply it at all. Use it within small bounded contexts, and guard the data from other BC's. The minute you poke a hole in the BC's data store, you've guaranteed yourself headaches down the road. This means don't try to make your user model something that's ES-based unless you're building an LDAP server or similar.

* CQRS does not require ES. ES does not require CQRS.

* on-demand projections are fine for a lot of purposes, learn to tell when you're going to need a static projection. Key indicators are reporting, background use, and expense of the projection. This is not a complete list of indications.

* a projection is part of a BC. Don't go querying other BC's at runtime for their data. If its important to the projection, establish a public contract on the events from the other BC, listen to them, and store the data independently. Yes, its duplicated, that's fine. YMMV.

* do not try to back ES into an existing application, unless you're a) rebuiding an entire feature silo from scratch; b) building an entirely new feature from scratch; c) there is no C. Its tempting, I've tried it, but your best value for time is to refactor into something more modular, which is the 80/20 value of it.

* If you're going to go async, go async. build that expectation into your UI. the pain of dealing with async commands comes from figuring out how to get feedback on them. Its a command; there is no feedback. Once it validates, its done as far as the sender is concerned. A failure to fulfill the contract is itself an event, like any other that comes over your event bus. If you build in the facilities to treat it as such from the beginning, your life is much easier.

* Use uuid's for PK's, and originate them with the client whenever possible. This allows for optimistic concurrency and additional commands to be sent before receiving the results of the original command. Also, track command ids/causation ids as part of the metadata for events. Its not always useful to have, but when it is, its very useful to have.

I'm sure there's more to say, but a lot of these lessons are basically common knowledge if you're well-read on the subject. A few of them are just things I've learned the hard way—I've broken damn near every one of them at some point, with regrets. That said, you do this enough and you learn which rules can be broken and when to break them, as with any other kind of expertise.

But ES has saved my bacon more than once. I've used it to back out of a poorly designed CRUD model, report on BI questions for years past, even restore data once when a network partition created a gap of several hours with high-frequency writes. (Chalk that up as a good reason to keep your event store independent of your transactional data store.) Yes, there are headaches to it—to pretend like CRUD doesn't have different versions of those headaches is disingenuous, or simply inexperience talking.

My issue with audit logs in crud systems is that they're almost always at the row level, which is almost useless when you're trying to make sense of the audit log. An audit log of "operations"—i.e. command log—is far more useful, and trivial to implement when CQRS is used. I'm guessing that's what this article details...

CQRS is a Good Thing(tm); for a real-world example of it in work on a not-so-shabby system processing 10B+ transactions/year - see http://ithare.com/gradual-oltp-db-development-from-zero-to-1... .

ES, however, is more controversial. If speaking about "pure" ES (i.e. not having any mutable state, and reconstructing current state from input events all the time) - versioning and potential synchronization failures (and synchronized access is a prereq for event sourcing) will kill it very quickly (and I didn't even start speaking about performance, which is going to be a very serious challenge).

OTOH, if understanding ES just as an ADDITION to classical mutable-state processing - it can be made very useful. Not only ES will serve as a perfect audit, the duplication of information (once in mutable state and once in input events) will allow such things as regression testing, and fixing data problems caused by bugs, within the DB. BTW - with this model, the latter can be done in a post-factum-fix manner and this, unlike "pure-ES" fixes, is not confusing to the readers who already got and stored previous state of the DB (with "pure" ES, after the fix, all the history can change, invalidating all the data which might have been stored by the third parties, and this is really crazy - imagine if your bank statements would change overnight; with a "ES+mutable" model, bugs still can be identified, and effects of the bugs can be found too - and then a separate correcting transaction can be issued against the DB, which is a much better match to a vast majority of existing business processes).

Hope it makes sense :-) (it is admittedly very sketchy, but forum is not a good place to elaborate further)

By the way, in a common CRUD app with an entity having 30 fields, you basically: used a DTO, modified its data and merged in the DB row.

Are we supposed to create 30 CQRS commands for this? Like property1updated, property2updated, etc.?