CQRS Event Sourcing check username is unique or not from EventStore while sending command

Question

EventSourcing works perfectly when we have particular unique EntityID but when I am trying to get information from eventStore other than particular EntityId i am having tough time.

I am using CQRS with EventSourcing. As part of event-sourcing we are storing the events in SQL table as columns(EntityID (uniqueKey),EventType,EventObject(eg. UserAdded)).

So while storing EventObject we are just serializing the DotNet object and storing it in SQL, So, All the details related to UserAdded event will be in xml format. My concern is I want to make sure the userName which is present in db Should be unique.

So, while making command of AddUser I have to query EventStore(sql db) whether the particular userName is already present in eventStore. So for doing that I need to serialize all the UserAdded/UserEdited events in Event store and check if requested username is present in eventStore.

But as part of CQRS commands are not allowed to query may be because of Race condition.

So, I tried before sending the AddUser command just query the eventStore and get all the UserNames by serializing all events(UserAdded) and fetch usernames and if requested username is unique then shoot command else throwing exception that userName already exist.

As with above approach ,we need to query entire db and we may have hundreds of thousands of events/day.So the execution of query/deserialization will take much time which will lead to performance issue.

I am looking for any better approach/suggestion for maintaining username Unique either by getting all userNames from eventStore or any other approach

Answer 1

So, your client (the thing that issues the commands) should have full faith that the command it sends will be executed, and it must do this by ensuring that, before it sends the RegisterUserCommand, that no other user is registered with that email address. In other words, your client must perform the validation, not your domain or even the application services that surround the domain.

From http://cqrs.nu/Faq

This is a commonly occurring question since we're explicitly not performing cross-aggregate operations on the write side. We do, however, have a number of options:

Create a read-side of already allocated user names. Make the client query the read-side interactively as the user types in a name.

Create a reactive saga to flag down and inactivate accounts that were nevertheless created with a duplicate user name. (Whether by extreme coincidence or maliciously or because of a faulty client.)

If eventual consistency is not fast enough for you, consider adding a table on the write side, a small local read-side as it were, of already allocated names. Make the aggregate transaction include inserting into that table.

Answer 2

Querying different aggregates with a repository in a write operation as part of your business logic is not forbidden. You can do that in order to accept the command or reject it due to duplicate user by using some domain service (a cross-aggregate operation). Greg Young mentions this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDW0QWie21s&t=24m55s

In normal scenarios you would just need to query all the UserCreated + UserEdited events. If you expect to have thousands of these events per day, maybe your events are bloated and you should design more atomically. For example, instead having a UserEdited event raised every time something happens on a user, consider having UserPersonalDetailsEdited and UserAccessInfoEdited or similar, where the fields that must be unique are treated differently from the rest of user fields. That way, querying all the UserCreated + UserAccessInfoEdited prior to accepting or not a command would be a lighter operation.

Personally I'd go with the following approach:

1. More atomicity in events so that everything that touches fields that should be globally unique is described more explicitly (e.g: UserCreated, UserAccessInfoEdited)
2. Have projections available in the write side in order to query them during a write operation. So for example I'd subscribe to all UserCreated and UserAccessInfoEdited events in order to keep a queryable "table" with all the unique fields (e.g: email).
3. When a CreateUser command arrives to the domain, a domain service would query this email table and accept or reject the command.

This solution relies a bit on eventual consistency and there's a possibility where the query tells us that field has not been used and allows the command to succeed raising an event UserCreated when actually the projection hadn't been updated yet from a previous transaction, causing therefore the situation where there are 2 fields in the system that are not globally unique.

If you want to completely avoid these uncertain situations because your business can't really deal with eventual consistency my recommendation is to deal with this in your domain by explicitly modeling them as part of your ubiquitous language. For example you could model your aggregates differently since it's obvious that your aggregate User is not really your transactional boundary (i.e: it depends on others).

Answer 3

As often, there's no right answer, only answers that fit your domain.

Are you in an environment that really requires immediate consistency ? What would be the odds of an identical user name being created between the moment uniqueness is checked by querying (say, at client side) and when the command is processed ? Would your domain experts tolerate, for instance, one out of 1 million user name conflict (that can be compensated afterwards) ? Will you have a million users in the first place ?

Even if immediate consistency is required, "user names should be unique"... in which scope ? A Company ? An OnlineStore ? A GameServerInstance ? Can you find the most restricted scope in which the uniqueness constraint must hold and make that scope the Aggregate Root from which to sprout a new user ? Why would the "replay all the UserAdded/UserEdited events" solution be bad after all, if the Aggregate Root makes these events small and simple ?