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CQRS, Task Based UIs, Event Sourcing agh!

Posted by gregyoung on February 16, 2010

Many people have been getting confused over what CQRS is. They look at CQRS as being an architecture; it is not. CQRS is a very simple pattern that enables many opportunities for architecture that may otherwise not exist. CQRS is not eventual consistency, it is not eventing, it is not messaging, it is not having separated models for reading and writing, nor is it using event sourcing. I want to take a few paragraphs to describe first exactly what CQRS is and then how it relates to other patterns.

CQRS Command and Query Responsibility Segregation

Starting with CQRS, CQRS is simply the creation of two objects where there was previously only one. The separation occurs based upon whether the methods are a command or a query (the same definition that is used by Meyer in Command and Query Separation, a command is any method that mutates state and a query is any method that returns a value).

	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD