Introduction

What is event sourcing?

What is event sourcing? One definition suggests the state of an event-sourced application is determined by a sequence of events. Another definition has event sourcing as a persistence mechanism for domain driven design.

That’s the basic story, at least. In practice, because a sequence of stored events can be queried in only a limited number of ways, to obtain the views of the state of an application that users need when making command requests, several other design patterns are needed to develop useful software. And several other design patterns are needed to ensure reliability, maintainability, and scalability.

This library

This is a library for event sourcing in Python. At its core, this library supports storing and retrieving sequences of items, such as the domain events of event-sourced aggregates in a domain driven design. A variety of schemas and technologies can be used for sequencing and storing events, and this library supports several of these possibilities.

To demonstrate how storing and retrieving domain events can be used effectively as a persistence mechanism in an event-sourced application, this library includes base classes for event-sourced domain entities and applications of different kinds. An domain model developed using these classes will not depend on infrastructure (“onion” archictecture). A style is suggested for event-sourced aggregates: to have command methods which “trigger” domain events. Triggered domain events are used to mutate the state of the aggregate, and then stored. The stored events of an aggregate can be retrieved and used to obtain the current state of the aggregate. The stored events of an application can also be propagated and used to project the state of the application into the materialised views needed by users. Stored events can also be processed further by other applications in the same system, and by other systems.

It is also possible to define an entire application, and indeed an entire distributed system of event-sourced applications, independently of infrastructure. That means system behaviours can be rapidly developed whilst running the entire system synchronously in a single thread with a single in-memory database. And then, the system can be run asynchronously on a cluster with durable databases, with the system effecting exactly the same behaviour.

A cohesive mechanism

Quoting from Eric Evans’ book Domain Driven Design:

“Partition a conceptually COHESIVE MECHANISM into a separate lightweight framework. Particularly watch for formalisms for well-documented categories of algorithms. Expose the capabilities of the framework with an INTENTION-REVEALING INTERFACE. Now the other elements of the domain can focus on expressing the problem (‘what’), delegating the intricacies of the solution (‘how’) to the framework.”

Although the basic event sourcing patterns are quite simple, and can be reproduced in code for each project, the persistence mechanism for event sourced domain driven design appears as a conceptually cohesive mechanism, and so can be “partitioned into a separate lightweight framework”.

Whilst some advocate that event sourcing is such a simple thing that you can easily roll-your-own event sourcing framework for each project, in practice it turns out reaching understanding and satisfaction (reliability, scalability, maintainability) is a considerably more complicated and costly undertaking than is disclosed by the simple story that is often told.

This library documents the experience of event sourcing across a broad range of projects. It also functions as an informative “jumping off” point for those who want to create their own framework and “own” all their own code. And it is also used by many as a stable and convenient library that can be used to rapidly develop working software that will be used in production.

Register issues

This project is hosted on GitHub. Please register any issues, questions, and requests you may have.