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Event Sourcing Pattern

• 08/26/2015
• 15 minutes to read

Use an append-only store to record the full series of events that describe actions taken on data in a domain, rather than storing just the current state, so that the store can be used to materialize the domain objects. This pattern can simplify tasks in complex domains by avoiding the requirement to synchronize the data model and the business domain; improve performance, scalability, and responsiveness; provide consistency for transactional data; and maintain full audit trails and history that may enable compensating actions.

Context and Problem

Most applications work with data, and the typical approach is for the application to maintain the current state of the data by updating it as users work with the data. For example, in the traditional create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) model a typical data process will be to read data from the store, make some modifications to it, and update the current state of the data with the new values—often by using transactions that lock the data.

The CRUD approach has some limitations:

• The fact that CRUD systems perform update operations directly against a data store may hinder performance and responsiveness, and limit scalability, due to the processing overhead it requires.
• In a collaborative domain with many concurrent users, data update conflicts are more likely to occur because the update operations take place on a single item of data.
• Unless there is an additional auditing mechanism, which records the details of each operation in a separate log, history is lost.

 Note

For a deeper understanding of the limits of the CRUD approach see “CRUD, Only When You Can Afford It” on MSDN.

Solution

The Event Sourcing pattern defines an approach to handling operations on data that is driven by a sequence of events, each of which is recorded in an append-only store. Application code sends a series of events that imperatively describe each action that has occurred on the data to the event store, where they are persisted. Each event represents a set of changes to the data (such as AddedItemToOrder).

The events are persisted in an event store that acts as the source of truth or system of record (the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information) about the current state of the data. The event store typically publishes these events so that consumers can be notified and can handle them if needed. Consumers could, for example, initiate tasks that apply the operations in the events to other systems, or perform any other associated action that is required to complete the operation. Notice that the application code that generates the events is decoupled from the systems that subscribe to the events.

Typical uses of the events published by the event store are to maintain materialized views of entities as actions in the application change them, and for integration with external systems. For example, a system may maintain a materialized view of all customer orders that is used to populate parts of the UI. As the application adds new orders, adds or removes items on the order, and adds shipping information, the events that describe these changes can be handled and used to update the materialized view.

 Note

See the Materialized View pattern for more information.

In addition, at any point in time it is possible for applications to read the history of events, and use it to materialize the current state of an entity by effectively “playing back” and consuming all the events related to that entity. This may occur on demand in order to materialize a domain object when handling a request, or through a scheduled task so that the state of the entity can be stored as a materialized view to support the presentation layer.

Figure 1 shows a logical overview of the pattern, including some of the options for using the event stream such as creating a materialized view, integrating events with external applications and systems, and replaying events to create projections of the current state of specific entities.

Figure 1 - An overview and example of the Event Sourcing pattern

The Event Sourcing pattern provides many advantages, including the following:

• Events are immutable and so can be stored using an append-only operation. The user interface, workflow, or process that initiated the action that produced the events can continue, and the tasks that handle the events can run in the background. This, combined with the fact that there is no contention during the execution of transactions, can vastly improve performance and scalability for applications, especially for the presentation level or user interface.
• Events are simple objects that describe some action that occurred, together with any associated data required to describe the action represented by the event. Events do not directly update a data store; they are simply recorded for handling at the appropriate time. These factors can simplify implementation and management.
• Events typically have meaning for a domain expert, whereas the complexity of the object-relational impedance mismatch might mean that a database table may not be clearly understood by the domain expert. Tables are artificial constructs that represent the current state of the system, not the events that occurred.
• Event sourcing can help to prevent concurrent updates from causing conflicts because it avoids the requirement to directly update objects in the data store. However, the domain model must still be designed to protect itself from requests that might result in an inconsistent state.
• The append-only storage of events provides an audit trail that can be used to monitor actions taken against a data store, regenerate the current state as materialized views or projections by replaying the events at any time, and assist in testing and debugging the system. In addition, the requirement to use compensating events to cancel changes provides a history of changes that were reversed, which would not be the case if the model simply stored the current state. The list of events can also be used to analyze application performance and detect user behavior trends, or to obtain other useful business information.
• The decoupling of the events from any tasks that perform operations in response to each event raised by the event store provides flexibility and extensibility. For example, the tasks that handle events raised by the event store are aware only of the nature of the event and the data it contains. The way that the task is executed is decoupled from the operation that triggered the event. In addition, multiple tasks can handle each event. This may enable easy integration with other services and systems that need only listen for new events raised by the event store. However, the event sourcing events tend to be very low level, and it may be necessary to generate specific integration events instead.

 Note

Event sourcing is commonly combined with the CQRS pattern by performing the data management tasks in response to the events, and by materializing views from the stored events.

Issues and Considerations

Consider the following points when deciding how to implement this pattern:

• The system will only be eventually consistent when creating materialized views or generating projections of data by replaying events. There is some delay between an application adding events to the event store as the result of handling a request, the events being published, and consumers of the events handling them. During this period, new events that describe further changes to entities may have arrived at the event store.

   Note

  See the Data Consistency Primer for information about eventual consistency.

• The event store is the immutable source of information, and so the event data should never be updated. The only way to update an entity in order to undo a change is to add a compensating event to the event store, much as you would use a negative transaction in accounting. If the format (rather than the data) of the persisted events needs to change, perhaps during a migration, it can be difficult to combine existing events in the store with the new version. It may be necessary to iterate through all the events making changes so that they are compliant with the new format, or add new events that use the new format. Consider using a version stamp on each version of the event schema in order to maintain both the old and the new event formats.

• Multi-threaded applications and multiple instances of applications may be storing events in the event store. The consistency of events in the event store is vital, as is the order of events that affect a specific entity (the order in which changes to an entity occur affects its current state). Adding a timestamp to every event is one option that can help to avoid issues. Another common practice is to annotate each event that results from a request with an incremental identifier. If two actions attempt to add events for the same entity at the same time, the event store can reject an event that matches an existing entity identifier and event identifier.

• There is no standard approach, or ready-built mechanisms such as SQL queries, for reading the events to obtain information. The only data that can be extracted is a stream of events using an event identifier as the criteria. The event ID typically maps to individual entities. The current state of an entity can be determined only by replaying all of the events that relate to it against the original state of that entity.

• The length of each event stream can have consequences on managing and updating the system. If the streams are large, consider creating snapshots at specific intervals such as a specified number of events. The current state of the entity can be obtained from the snapshot and by replaying any events that occurred after that point in time.

   Note

  For more information about creating snapshots of data, see Snapshot on Martin Fowler’s Enterprise Application Architecture website and Master-Subordinate Snapshot Replication on MSDN.

• Even though event sourcing minimizes the chance of conflicting updates to the data, the application must still be able to deal with inconsistencies that may arise through eventual consistency and the lack of transactions. For example, an event that indicates a reduction in stock inventory might arrive in the data store while an order for that item is being placed, resulting in a requirement to reconcile the two operations; probably by advising the customer or creating a back order.

• Event publication may be “at least once,” and so consumers of the events must be idempotent. They must not reapply the update described in an event if the event is handled more than once. For example, if multiple instances of a consumer maintain an aggregate of a property of some entity, such as the total number of orders placed, only one must succeed in incrementing the aggregate when an “order placed” event occurs. While this is not an intrinsic characteristic of event sourcing, it is the usual implementation decision.

When to Use this Pattern

This pattern is ideally suited to the following scenarios:

• When you want to capture “intent,” “purpose,” or “reason” in the data. For example, changes to a customer entity may be captured as a series of specific event types such as Moved home, Closed account, or Deceased.
• When it is vital to minimize or completely avoid the occurrence of conflicting updates to data.
• When you want to record events that occur, and be able to replay them to restore the state of a system; use them to roll back changes to a system; or simply as a history and audit log. For example, when a task involves multiple steps you may need to execute actions to revert updates and then replay some steps to bring the data back into a consistent state.
• When using events is a natural feature of the operation of the application, and requires little additional development or implementation effort.
• When you need to decouple the process of inputting or updating data from the tasks required to apply these actions. This may be to improve UI performance, or to distribute events to other listeners such as other applications or services that must take some action when the events occur. An example would be integrating a payroll system with an expenses submission website so that events raised by the event store in response to data updates made in the expenses submission website are consumed by both the website and the payroll system.
• When you want flexibility to be able to change the format of materialized models and entity data if requirements change, or—when used in conjunction with CQRS—you need to adapt a read model or the views that expose the data.
• When used in conjunction with CQRS, and eventual consistency is acceptable while a read model is updated or, alternatively, the performance impact incurred in rehydrating entities and data from an event stream is acceptable.

This pattern might not be suitable in the following situations:

• Small or simple domains, systems that have little or no business logic, or non-domain systems that naturally work well with traditional CRUD data management mechanisms.
• Systems where consistency and real-time updates to the views of the data are required.
• Systems where audit trails, history, and capabilities to roll back and replay actions are not required.
• Systems where there is only a very low occurrence of conflicting updates to the underlying data. For example, systems that predominantly add data rather than updating it.

Example

A conference management system needs to track the number of completed bookings for a conference so that it can check whether there are seats still available when a potential attendee tries to make a new booking. The system could store the total number of bookings for a conference in at least two ways:

• The system could store the information about the total number of bookings as a separate entity in a database that holds booking information. As bookings are made or cancelled, the system could increment or decrement this number as appropriate. This approach is simple in theory, but can cause scalability issues if a large number of attendees are attempting to book seats during a short period of time. For example, in the last day or so prior to the booking period closing.
• The system could store information about bookings and cancellations as events held in an event store. It could then calculate the number of seats available by replaying these events. This approach can be more scalable due to the immutability of events. The system only needs to be able to read data from the event store, or to append data to the event store. Event information about bookings and cancellations is never modified.

Figure 2 shows how the seat reservation sub-system of the conference management system might be implemented by using event sourcing.

Figure 2 - Using event sourcing to capture information about seat reservations in a conference management system

The sequence of actions for reserving two seats is as follows:

1. The user interface issues a command to reserve seats for two attendees. The command is handled by a separate command handler (a piece of logic that is decoupled from the user interface and is responsible for handling requests posted as commands).

2. An aggregate containing information about all reservations for the conference is constructed by querying the events that describe bookings and cancellations. This aggregate is called SeatAvailability, and is contained within a domain model that exposes methods for querying and modifying the data in the aggregate.

    Note

   Some optimizations to consider are using snapshots (so that you don’t need to query and replay the full list of events to obtain the current state of the aggregate), and maintaining a cached copy of the aggregate in memory.

3. The command handler invokes a method exposed by the domain model to make the reservations.

4. The SeatAvailability aggregate records an event containing the number of seats that were reserved. The next time the aggregate applies events, all the reservations will be used to compute how many seats remain.

5. The system appends the new event to the list of events in the event store.

If a user wishes to cancel a seat, the system follows a similar process except that the command handler issues a command that generates a seat cancellation event and appends it to the event store

As well as providing more scope for scalability, using an event store also provides a complete history, or audit trail, of the bookings and cancellations for a conference. The events recorded in the event store are the definitive and only source of truth. There is no need to persist aggregates in any other way because the system can easily replay the events and restore the state to any point in time.

 Note

You can find more information about this example in the chapter Introducing Event Sourcing in the patterns & practices guide CQRS Journey on MSDN.

Related Patterns and Guidance

The following patterns and guidance may also be relevant when implementing this pattern:

• Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) Pattern. The write store that provides the immutable source of information for a CQRS implementation is often based on an implementation of the Event Sourcing pattern. The Command and Query Responsibility Segregation pattern describes how to segregate the operations that read data in an application from the operations that update data by using separate interfaces.
• Materialized View Pattern. The data store used in a system based on event sourcing is typically not well suited to efficient querying. Instead, a common approach is to generate pre-populated views of the data at regular intervals, or when the data changes. The Materialized View pattern shows how this can be achieved.
• Compensating Transaction Pattern. The existing data in an event sourcing store is not updated; instead new entries are added that transition the state of entities to the new values. To reverse a change, compensating entries are used because it is not possible to simply reverse the previous change. The Compensating Transaction pattern describes how to undo the work that was performed by a previous operation.
• Data Consistency Primer. When using event sourcing with a separate read store or materialized views, the read data will not be immediately consistent; instead it will be only eventually consistent. The Data Consistency Primer summarizes the issues surrounding maintaining consistency over distributed data.
• Data Partitioning Guidance. Data is often partitioned when using event sourcing in order to improve scalability, reduce contention, and optimize performance. The Data Partitioning****Guidance describes how to divide data into discrete partitions, and the issues that can arise.

More Information

• The article see “CRUD, Only When You Can Afford It” on MSDN.
• Introducing Event Sourcing and A CQRS and ES Deep Dive in the patterns & practices guide CQRS Journey on MSDN.
• The post Event Sourcing on Martin Fowler's blog.
• Greg Young’s post Why use Event Sourcing? On the Code Better website.