When working on complex and distributed systems my goal is to make things as simple as possible. Take a look at how some of the biggest architecture projects, like Kafka, out there design to be high-performant and fault tolerant; partitions (or, sharding the data that passes through it), and append-only. Those are two of the key architectural principles that make Kafka work.
It is hard to reason about these systems, and it is hard to be confident when identifying just what exactly is happening. Ensuring that your operational data (99% of the times this is your database) is an append-only log of events is my go-to strategy.
Sometimes that means I have a system-versioned tables (whether supported out of the box, or enforced with triggers). Sometimes that means there is a process that runs at a regular interval to “make sense” of the collection of records that I have. Because that collection is ever changing.
But if you have an important piece of data, that can be mutated by many different processes, and you’ve got UPDATE statements running over one another you are quickly going to get confused as to just how you got to your final state. I don’t care how many logging statements you put in there.
There is a reason these amazing projects use this techniques. They are tried and true. They are simple. They can be reasoned about.
You may not be building the next great piece of internet or software plumbing. But it doesn’t mean you can’t use the same techniques.
Read more: The Value of Append-Only