Event Sourcing

Event Sourcing is an approach to persistent data management where the primary record is a log of all events that update the system. This log can be replayed to recreate the entire database state at any point in time. Event Sourcing provides significant benefits, including strong auditing, the ability to reconstruct historic states, and the ability to replay events for debugging and analysis.

Why Event Sourcing?

• Complete Audit Trail: Every change to the application state is captured as an immutable event, providing full transparency and traceability.
• Historic State Reconstruction: Enables reconstruction of past states by replaying events, facilitating retroactive adjustments and debugging.
• Enhanced Analytics: Drives greater customer insight by capturing business-meaningful events for advanced analytics.
• Event Replay: Simplifies troubleshooting and debugging by allowing systems to reproduce exact scenarios using event logs.

Adoption at INFO

• Trial Phase: Event Sourcing is currently in the trial phase for projects utilizing Event-Driven Architectures. We aim to validate its practical benefits and scalability across diverse use cases.
• Use Cases: Particularly useful for systems requiring strong auditing, historical state tracking, and complex business workflows.
• Complementary Techniques: Works well with other patterns such as CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) to optimize query and command operations.

Considerations

• Complexity: Implementing Event Sourcing can increase the complexity of data models and infrastructure.
• Storage Requirements: Event logs require additional storage compared to traditional state-based models.
• Operational Overhead: Requires a robust strategy for event versioning and log replay mechanisms.

Moving Forward

As we trial Event Sourcing, we are focusing on its potential to enhance auditing, debugging, and analytical capabilities in systems where traditional approaches fall short. Its ability to provide an immutable, comprehensive event log positions it as a powerful tool for modern, data-driven applications.

This blip is currently no longer in assess because we are focussing on other topics.

When using Even-Driven Architectures we urge you to consider using Event Sourcing.

Event sourcing is an approach to thinking about persistent data where the primary record is a log of all events that make updates. A traditional representation of the database state can be entirely recreated by reprocessing this event log. Event sourcing’s benefits include strong auditing, creation of a historic state, and replaying of events for debugging and analysis. Event sourcing has been around for a while, but we think it is used much less than it should be.

Event Sourcing ensures that all changes to the application state are stored as a sequence of events. Not only can we query these events, but we can also use the event log to reconstruct past states, and as a foundation to automatically adjust the state to cope with retroactive changes. Complementary to the capture of business meaningful events, the technique has positive implications for analytics in driving greater customer insight.