CAP Theorem, CQRS and Eventually Consistent

First, if you haven’t heard of Eric Brewer’s CAP theorem, it basically states that you can must choose two of three:

  • Consistency
  • Availability
  • Partition Tolerance

CQRS doesn’t solve CAP issues, however it allows you to decide independently what is important on both read and write side.

For example, you could assume a systems would be ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable) compliant on the write/domain site and BASE (Basic Availability, Soft-State, Eventually Consistent) on the read side.

Eventual consistency is something that requires a change of mindset.  Because of our heavy use in ACID compliant databases, thinking about possibly having stale data blows our mind.

There are two important points about I want to make about eventually consistent data.

  • The data isn’t wrong.  It’s old.  There is a big difference here.  The data you may be consuming may not be up-to-date, however it was correct at one point in time.
  • In the real world, we use stale data all the time.

A good example, from Greg Young, was if you read the newspaper/website and notice some statistics on the unemployment rate, this is obviously stale data.  If those stats were a a week old, would this matter?  How much of a difference would a week make to unemployment rate?  Probably not much. However, there are scenarios where you want to be much closer to actual, and in these cases define an SLA.

The point is, in many situations, eventually consistent data is acceptable.

Greg Young: 8 Lines of Code

Greg Young gave a good talk titled 8 Lines of Code, discussing simplicity, dependencies, and magic.

Magic is always something I try and identify and stay away from in my own code, however I really failed to realize how much magic goes on in some of the libraries/frameworks that I often use.  Entity Framework and nHibernate come to mind.  You really should understand the magic happening in these libraries to use them.  Which is very problematic.

If you take the dependency ownership seriously, then a lot of folks developing the front-end of a “modern” web applications are in a world of hurt.  RequireJS, Knockout.js, jQuery, Bootstrap, etc, etc, etc…

Video is posted on InfoQ:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/8-lines-code-refactoring

Service Bus for Windows Server

Move over MSMQ, Service Bus for Windows Server was recently released.  Apparently it has been for awhile now (Oct 2012 release).  I’m just late to the party I guess.

Service Bus 1.0 was designed to allow for enterprise messaging capabilities in a Windows Server-based environment.  It enables you to build, test, and run loosely-coupled, message-driven applications in self-managed environments and on developer computers.  The two primary features are Service Bus Queues and Service Bus Topics and Subscriptions.

  • Service Bus Queues offer reliable message storage and retrieval with a choice of protocols and APIs. Use Service Bus queue in your application to provide load leveling by having the message receiver processing messages at its own pace or to provide load balancing by having multiple, competing receivers accepting messages from the same queue.

For more information on Service Bus queues refer to How to Use Service Bus Queues.

  • Service Bus Topics and Subscriptions offer (in addition to all of the queue’s) rich publish-subscribe capabilities allowing multiple, concurrent subscribers to independently retrieve filtered or unfiltered views of the published message stream.

If you are interested in or use messaging technology within your applications, this is some pretty exciting news.  Service Bus for Windows Server provides the same capabilities (Message Queues, Pub/Sub) as the Windows Azure Service Bus.  Best of all, it’s free.

It’s available for download now.  Also, check out the MSDN documentation.