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. Its stable identifier reached the export action. No matching row existed in the newer application’s user table, so the action built a temporary object with safe fallback details. That object had a synthetic local identifier, but its export identifier remained null. Later, a queued data object required that identifier to be a string and rejected the payload.

Identifiers on Brian Faust

An Identifier Should Outlive Its Storage Engine