conference logo

Playlist "BOB Konferenz 2022"

Event Sourcing without Responsibility

Michael Sperber

This is a follow-up to Andreas Bernauer’s talk from BOB
2016: The talk examines the implementation of event-sourcing
in a highly distributed application for configuration
management in a large network of car shops among mobile
devices that are only sporadically connected.

When building an event-sourced systems, it’s a common reflex to
construct projections to answer queries instead of sifting through the
event stream, using the CQRS paradigm. However, CQRS might not quite
be the best way to organize an event-sourced system: The concept of
“responbility” is foggy in many contexts, and the separation between
“read models” and “write models” is the wrong axis to use for
organizing storage and indexing. Moreover, CQRS may lead to
implementing read models prematurely and unnecessarily.

We demonstrate how the implementation of event sourcing and CQRS
played out in our configuration-management application, and reflect
the implications for the architecture of future systems.