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When to avoid or allow upserts

Introduction 

A few recent posts on this blog have outlined how we could achieve version aware upserting of data into various databases. In this post let's consider situations where that might be an unsuitable approach. 

An assumption about Id uniqueness

When we attempt to take an entity and write it into a database, we have an expectation that the attribute or attributes that are used to uniquely identify that entity are safe to handle as trustworthy within the business domain. Let's consider a situation where that assumption has been known to fall down in real production systems.

Generation of a value to be used as the primary key in a relational database can seem to be a solved problem, given that we now have UUIDs that can be generated and passed around for use in our applications and services.

Some earlier implementations for generation of UUID involved combining the MAC address associated with the network device of the machine and the current time as a way of combining to produce a value that would not clash with other machines.

There turned out to be limitations to the uniqueness guarantee when the processing speed and concurrency of the machine resulted in multiple "unique" values being generated at effectively the same time.

Another unfortunate way of producing colliding UUIDs values could occur when a virtual machine happened to have been set up specifying the same MAC address, further increasing the risk of collisions.

For situations where the identifier generator cannot be trusted, we should focus our efforts on recognizing inserts and updates as clearly differentiated operations. 

Trusting a source of truth

It is common for alternative representations of data to exist downstream from an originating system. These may asynchronously apply some transformations or aggregations to produce an entity that is intended for reporting or any manner of follow-on business processing.

In this situation the system is far enough removed from the original data creation that there is little point in expecting inserts and updates to arrive in order.

One size does not fit all

I have made some broad generalizations, but the universal consideration applies, "It depends"....  You may find yourself needing a pipeline that can and must differentiate between creating and updating, in which case you can also expect to need to have firm control over the ordering of those events - perhaps involving Kafka with suitable partitioning and concurrency controls. That's a topic for another post.

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