What is the strategy of SharedString on Merging data? - fluid-framework

I go through the introduction but only find DDS like SharedMap where they are using last-writer-wins policy. How about the SharedString? I am considering a collaborative editing scenario with the SharedString. I have read OT and CRDT. So I am wondering how SharedString or other DDS handled the merge conflict.

The shared string readme goes into some details about how merging works:
https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework/blob/main/packages/dds/sequence/README.md

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Best way to import data using Axon Framwork

What is the best way to import an excel file (or do mass insert) containing entities using the Axon Framework ?
Should we use a command with the excel file as a byte array, then parse the file in the Aggregate and send them each line as an event ? or create an event the list of entities (but then how to update aggregates) ? or parse the excel file outside of the aggregate and then create command of each row ?
Thanks for help.
Technically speaking, you have two options (each with many variations):
Parse the file on the client-side and issue a command per record
Send one command with the entire content (the file itself or the content converted to another format). The command handler (aggregate or not) then iterates over the records and performs the required action per each.
Which one you choose and how exactly do you implement it depends on a lot of factors, such as:
whether or not the data is about "entities" that are part of the same aggregate or not
the size of the data (both in bytes and number of records)
the performance and security requirements and constraints
what information needs to be stored (namely, should the system "remember" there was a "mass insert")
are the aggregates event-sourced or state-stored
...
As you can see, there are way too many possibilities for anyone to be able to give you a generic "best way".
That said, it is a very interesting question that can spark some architectural discussions. Unfortunately, StackOverflow is not the right place to have those (see What topics can I ask about here? and What types of questions should I avoid asking?).
If you would like to discuss those options in more detail I suggest posting the question on AxonIQ's Discuss platform.
it pretty much depends on what kind of Event is valuable for your business.
But in general, parsing the file outside of the Aggregate (this is not what the Aggregate is used for) and firing multiple commands (one for each line) would be my choice.
In that case, you will have an Event on your EventStore for each line which will make it way more explicity about what happened. Also, important to note that in this case, your Events will be granular and not that big, which usually I see as a code smell =)
KR,

lakeFS, Hudi, Delta Lake merge and merge conflicts

I'm reading documentation about lakeFS and right now don't clearly understand what is a merge or even merge conflict in terms of lakeFS.
Let's say I use Apache Hudi for ACID support over a single table. I'd like to introduce multi-table ACID support and for this purpose would like to use lakeFS together with Hudi.
If I understand everything correctly, lakeFS is a data agnostic solution and knows nothing about the data itself. lakeFS only establishes boundaries (version control) and moderates somehow the concurent access to the data..
So the reasonable question is - if lakeFS is data agnostic, how it supports merge operation? What merge itself means in terms of lakeFS? And is it possible to have a merge conflict there?
You do understand everything correctly. You could see in the branching model page that lakeFS is currently data agnostic and relies simply on the hierarchical directory structure. A conflict would occur when two branches update the same file.
This behavior fits most data engineers CI/CD use cases.
In case you are working with Delta Lake and made changes to the same table from two different branches, there will still be a conflict because the two branches changed the log file. In order to resolve the conflict you would need to forgo one of the change sets.
Admittedly this is not the best user experience and it's currently being worked on. You could read more about it on the roadmap documentation.

How can I alter the incoming documents on replication in CouchDB

I need to replicate in CouchDB data from one database to another but in the process I want to alter the documents being replicated over,
mostly stripping out particular fields (but other applications mentioned in comments).
The replication would always be 100% one way (but other applications mentioned in comments could use bi-directional and sync)
I would prefer if this process did not increment their revision ID but that might be asking for too much.
But I don't see any of the design document functions that do what I am trying to do.
As it seems doesn't do this, what plans are there for adding this? And meanwhile, what workarounds are there?
No, there is no out-of-the-box solution, as this would defy the whole purpose and logic of multi-master, MVCC logic.
The only option I can see here is to create your own solution, but I would not call this a replication, but rather ETL (Extract, Transform, Load). And for ETL there are tools available that will let you do the trick, like (mixing open source and commercial here):
Scriptella
CloverETL
Pentaho Data Integration, or to be more specific Kettle
Jespersoft ETL
Talend have some tools as well
There is plenty more of ETL tools on the market.
I believe the best approach here would be to break out the fields you want to filter out into a separate document and then filter out the document during replication.
Of course the best way would be to have built-support for this, but a workaround which occurs to me would be, instead of here using the built-in replication, to code and use a custom replication which will do the additional needed alterations/transformations, still using rather than going beneith, the other built-ins, and with good coding, in many situations (especially if each master can push to its slaves), it feels this could be nearly as efficient.
This requires efficient triggers be put on each source/master to detect any changes, which I believe CouchDB does offer (or at least PouchDB appears to), which would then copy the changes to another location also doing the full alterations.
If the source of the change is unable to push the change to the final destination, this fixed store may to be local to it where the destination can pull from -- which could get pretty expensive especially in multi-master, as each location has to not only store & maintain its own data but also the data (being sent) of everyone it sends to.
This replicate would also place each source document's revision ID in the the document's copy...
...that is ideally, including essential if the copy was to be {updated, aka a master}, too.
...in form of either:
ideally the normal "_rev" property. Indeed this looks quite possible per it ("preserve their revisions ID") already done by the normal replication algorithm using the builtin "Bulk Docs API" which seemingly our varient would use, too
otherwise have a new copy object (with its own _rev) plus another field as "_rev_original" ntelling the original rev. But well that would work?
Clearly such copy could be created no problem.
Probably no big if the destination is just reading the data.
Seems hairy if the destination is also writing the data. As we'd now have to merge with these non-standard revisions. But doable.
Relevant to this (coding an a custom/improved replication (to do this apparently-missing functionality) ideally without altering Pouch and especially Couch source code), as starter/basis material (the standard method), here's the normal Couch replication algorithm which unfortunately doens't clearly say it only uses builtin ops but it looks like it, and also the official overview of what it does; I'm suspecting Pouch implements this, likely in Pouch's replicate.js (latest release as of 2014.07).
Futher implementation particulars? - those who would know, please put it here.
This is a "community wiki" answer so please extend it.
Also please comment links & details of anyone/system already doing or trying to do this or similar.

Strategies for search across disparate data sources

I am building a tool that searches people based on a number of attributes. The values for these attributes are scattered across several systems.
As an example, dateOfBirth is stored in a SQL Server database as part of system ABC. That person's sales region assignment is stored in some horrible legacy database. Other attributes are stored in a system only accessible over an XML web service.
To make matters worse, the the legacy database and the web service can be really slow.
What strategies and tips should I consider for implementing a search across all these systems?
Note: Although I posted an answer, I'm not confident its a great answer. I don't intend to accept my own answer unless no one else gives better insight.
You could consider using an indexing mechanism to retrieve and locally index the data across all the systems, and then perform your searches against the index. Searches would be an awful lot faster and more reliable.
Of course, this just shifts the problem from one part of your system to another - now your indexing mechanism has to handle failures and heterogeneous systems, but that may be an easier problem to solve.
Another factor is how often the data changes. If you have to query data in real-time that goes stale very quickly, then indexing may not be practical.
If you can get away with a restrictive search, start by returning a list based on the search criteria corresponding to the fastest data source. Then join up those records with the other systems and remove records which don't match the search criteria.
If you have to implement OR logic, this approach is not going to work.
While not an actual answer, this might at least get you partway to a workable solution. We had a similar situation at a previous employer - lots of data sources, different ways of accessing those data sources, different access permissions, military/government/civilian sources, etc. We used Mule, which is built around the Enterprise Service Bus concept, to connect these data sources to our application. My details are a bit sketchy, as I wasn't the actual implementor, just an integrator, but what we did was define a channel in Mule. Then you write a simple integration piece to go between the channel and the data source, and the application and the channel. The integration piece does the work of making the actual query, and formatting the results, so we had a generic SQL integration piece for accessing a database, and for things like web services, we had some base classes that implemented common functionality, so the actual customization of the integration piecess was a lot less work than it sounds like. The application could then query the channel, which would handle accessing the various data sources, transforming them into a normalized bit of XML, and return the results to the application.
This had a lot of advantages for our situation. We could include new data sources for existing queries by simply connecting them to the channel - the application didn't have to know or care what data sources where there, as it only looked at the data from the channel. Since data can be pushed or pulled from the channel, we could have a data source update the application when, for example, it was updated.
It took a while to get it configured and working, but once we got it going, we were pretty successful with it. In our demo setup, we ended up with 4 or 5 applications acting as both producers and consumers of data, and connecting to maybe 10 data sources.
Have you thought of moving the data into a separate structure?
For example, Lucene stores data to be searched in a schema-less inverted indexed. You could have a separate program that retrieves data from all your different sources and puts them in a Lucene index. Your search could work against this index and the search results could contain a unique identifier and the system it came from.
http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/
(There are implementations in other languages as well)
Have you taken a look at YQL? It may not be the perfect solution but I might give you starting point to work from.
Well, for starters I'd parallelize the queries to the different systems. That way we can minimize the query time.
You might also want to think about caching and aggregating the search attributes for subsequent queries in order to speed things up.
You have the option of creating an aggregation service or middleware that aggregates all the different systems so that you can provide a single interface for querying. If you do that, this is where I'd do the previously mentioned cache and parallize optimizations.
However, with all of that it you will need weighing up the development time/deployment time /long term benefits of the effort against migrating the old legacy database to a faster more modern one. You haven't said how tied into other systems those databases are so it may not be a very viable option in the short term.
EDIT: in response to data going out of date. You can consider caching if your data if you don't need the data to always match the database in real time. Also, if some data doesn't change very often (e.g. dates of birth) then you should cache them. If you employ caching then you could make your system configurable as to what tables/columns to include or exclude from the cache and you could give each table/column a personalizable cache timeout with an overall default.
Use Pentaho/Kettle to copy all of the data fields that you can search on and display into a local MySQL database
http://www.pentaho.com/products/data_integration/
Create a batch script to run nightly and update your local copy. Maybe even every hour. Then, write your query against your local MySQL database and display the results.

Alternative Data Access pattern to Repository

I have certain objects in my domain which are not aggregate roots/entities, yet I still need to retrieve them from a database. I don't want to confuse things by creating repositories for these things. So, what are alternative data access patterns? Would you simply create a DAO for them, while still of course separating the interface?
Edit:
Some more detail on what I'm doing. I need to create a code. This code has certain rules as to its format. One of the rules is that the final character must be a unique number incremented by one from the last code generated. For example:
ABCD1
ABCD2
ABCD3
So, I'm keeping a table with one row, one column to store the number in question. Now, I don't want to consider this number an entity and create a repository for it - that's overkill. I just need a way of retrieving the number, adding 1 to it, and saving it. I know there are myriad ways I could do it, but I'm wondering if there's an customary way.
There are several data access patterns that could apply, in theory. You'd need to provide more detail though if you want us to suggest a specific pattern.
Without more detail, all I can suggest is to consider looking into Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture book.
Edit: Customary way? No, not that I can think of - it really depends on where and how you're using this unique code in your domain. If I were doing this, I'd probably create a small service that speaks directly to the database to perform this function - not as heavy-weight as a repository, and very focused on the problem at hand.
Based on the edit: I would look first at the context in which you need to create that code. Perhaps there are some related entities or something that you are missing.
btw, I find the question really interesting as it comes up from time to time while coding specific features. I usually end up finding I was missing something on the scenario and it ends up fitting well with the normal repository pattern.
After surveying the options I'm going with the Table Gateway pattern.

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