Transactional event sourcing using slick

Talk by Adam Warski. Event sourcing means that all the changes in the system are captured as a sequence of events.
Reasons for event sourcing: keeping information (not losing info), auditing the information in the system. But it is also useful to recreate the system state.
Hibernate was a technology developed by Adam for Java.
The goal is to have event sourcing with rdbms. There are other approaches (event store, akka persistence, eventuate).
Event is immutable, is the primary source of truth. The payload is an arbitrary json, the name is the case class name. Transaction ID, event ID and user ID.
Events are stored in a dedicated table. A read model is created on the event in the crud. This gives consistency.
DBIOAction[T] gets a description of actions to be done.
User data arrives in the system, within a command (a Scala method). The command uses read to validate the data, if data is valid the command generates a series of actions to perform that updates the model. Event listeners are triggered at this time. Each event listener may trigger further events.
Demo follows for ordering a Tesla model 3.
Summary – no library, just a small adapter. Event listener performs side effects.

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The system could have been written with free monads. That would have improved testability. But free monads don’t come for free – you have to pay a price to decode them from the code and figure out what the code is trying to do. As Adam said, maybe it’s just me.
And saying this here while presenting a relational db approach takes really a brave heart.

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