An Identifier Should Outlive Its Storage Engine

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A billing export once had enough information to reconstruct a missing account, but not enough to name it. The account still existed in an older system and its stable identifier reached the export action. What did not exist was a matching row in the newer application’s user table.

The action worked around that absence by building a temporary object with safe fallback details. It even gave the object a synthetic local identifier. The field used as the export identity remained null, though, and a queued data object later rejected the payload because that field had to be a string. The fallback had solved the missing attributes while losing the one fact the export actually needed: which account it was about.

Identifiers on Brian Faust

An Identifier Should Outlive Its Storage Engine