Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 4, 2014

Idempotence Is Not a Medical Condition

Filed under: Distributed Systems,Merging,Messaging — Patrick Durusau @ 2:06 pm

Idempotence Is Not a Medical Condition by Pat Helland.

From the post:

The definition of distributed computing can be confusing. Sometimes, it refers to a tightly coupled cluster of computers working together to look like one larger computer. More often, however, it refers to a bunch of loosely related applications chattering together without a lot of system-level support.

This lack of support in distributed computing environments makes it difficult to write applications that work together. Messages sent between systems do not have crisp guarantees for delivery. They can get lost, and so, after a timeout, they are retried. The application on the other side of the communication may see multiple messages arrive where one was intended. These messages may be reordered and interleaved with different messages. Ensuring that the application behaves as intended can be very hard to design and implement. It is even harder to test.

In a world full of retried messages, idempotence is an essential property for reliable systems. Idempotence is a mathematical term meaning that performing an operation multiple times will have the same effect as performing it exactly one time. The challenges occur when messages are related to each other and may have ordering constraints. How are messages associated? What can go wrong? How can an application developer build a correctly functioning app without losing his or her mojo?

A very good discussion of idempotence in the context of distributed (message passing) systems. You may recall the TMRM defining merging operators to be idempotent. (Section 8 )

Pat’s examples on idempotence include:

  1. Sweeping the floor is idempotent. If you sweep it multiple times, you still get a clean floor.
  2. Baking a cake is not idempotent.
  3. Baking a cake starting from a shopping list (if you don’t care about money) is idempotent.

As an aside, #2 is not idempotent because “a cake” means a particular cake. It can only be baked once, at least if you want to have an edible result. In #3, the act of baking from a shopping list (I prefer a recipe) and not the cake, is idempotent.

The post is quite good, particularly if you are interested in a reliable messaging based system.

I first saw this in Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 3rd, 2014, which had the following note:

Pat Helland with a classically great article on Idempotence. Fortunately the article is not idempotent. Everytime you read it your brain updates with something new.

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