In CQRS (event-sourced), do you need a global sequence counter in the event store?

Posted by Jon M on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Jon M
Published on 2010-06-01T09:21:35Z Indexed on 2010/06/01 9:23 UTC
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In trying to get my head around CQRS (and DDD in general) I have come across situations when two events occur on different aggregates but the order of them has domain meaning. If so then they could happen so close together that a timestamp (as used by the sample implementations I have seen) cannot differentiate them, meaning the event store doesn't contain a 'complete' representation of the domain as there is ambiguity over the order in which events occurred.

As an example, the domain could fire a CustomerCreatedEvent which applies to the Customer aggregate, and then a CustomerAssignedToAgent event on the Agent aggregate. The CustomerAssignedToAgent event doesn't make sense if it occurs before the CustomerCreatedEvent, but typically both of these might be fired as a result of one operation which makes it likely that the timestamps would effectively be the same.

So am I just modelling things badly? Should there ever be a situation where the sequence of events across different aggregates is important? Or should you keep a global sequence number on your event store, so that you can identify the exact sequence in which events occurred?

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