Event Sourcing for Data History
Storing events not state, rebuilding state from events, and when it's worth the complexity.
Traditional databases store the current state of the world. A customer's balance is $500. An order's status is "shipped." A product's price is $29.99. When something changes, you overwrite the old value with the new one. The history is gone.
Event sourcing flips this model. Instead of storing the current state, you store the sequence of events that produced it. A customer's account isn't "$500" — it's "created with $0, deposited $300, deposited $400, withdrew $200." The current state is derived by replaying the events.
This is a powerful pattern, but it's also a significant architectural commitment. Used correctly, it provides a perfect audit trail, the ability to rebuild state at any point in time, and natural support for distributed systems. Used incorrectly, it's a complexity tra
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