Idempotence
This post has been imported from my previous blog. I did my best to parse XML properly, but it might have some errors.
If you find one, send a Pull Request.
Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of dddcrqs group. The reason was a project I’m writing, which will be implemented in a DDD paradigm using CQRS and the event sourcing. As I read about about them, I found over one year old Greg’s post considering pros and cons of idempotence. The definition of idempotence is pretty straight forward. We call an operation idempotent iff: f(f(x)) = f(x) which simply means, that applying the same function multiple times brings the same result. In mathematics, you can find a constant f unction, giving the same result for each argument, hence, during multiple application. That’s the mathematician point of view. What about computer science? It can be easily brought to the DDD field, especially, the event-sourced implementation of it. For those who don’t know what the event sourcing is, take a look here. Consider the following chain of events for a client’s bank account:
- Marked as default
- Money transfer ‘500$’ ordered to ‘x’ account
- Label ‘leave sth for the future month’ added
Which of them would you consider idempotent and under which conditions?
