Scriba Architecture

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This document is the architectural contract for Scriba v0.1. It is prescriptive about structure, invariants, and dependencies. It is deliberately silent on implementation details that should follow from the constraints.


1. Purpose

Scriba is a projection engine for Elixir event-sourced systems. It keeps read models continuously synchronized with an event stream by pulling events from a source, routing them to user-defined handle/2 callbacks in per-stream order, applying results atomically with position tracking, and emitting telemetry for operational visibility.

It is not an event store, a CQRS framework, a stream processing engine, a message queue consumer, or a job queue. It composes with Commanded; it does not replace it.

The user's mental model must remain tiny: "I write a module with handle/2 clauses; Scriba calls them at the right time, in the right order, exactly the right number of times, and tells me if anything goes wrong."


2. Scope of v0.1

In scope:

  • Scriba.Projection behaviour with __using__ macro
  • Scriba.Source.Commanded adapter
  • Scriba.Target.Ecto adapter with atomic position tracking
  • Partitioned worker pool with per-stream ordering (consistent hash on stream_id)
  • Telemetry events: [:scriba, :projection, :event, :start | :stop | :exception]

  • Position tracking table + Ecto migration
  • Supervision tree
  • Property-based tests for the three core invariants (see §10)
  • Dead-letter handling for failing events (see §9)
  • Hex-publishable as 0.1.0 with README, CHANGELOG, LICENSE (Apache-2.0)

Out of scope for v0.1 (do not build, do not stub, do not "leave room for"):

  • LiveView dashboard (v0.2)
  • Lag/throughput metrics beyond raw telemetry events (v0.2)
  • Online rebuild, shadow targets, swap (v0.3)
  • Adapters other than Commanded source + Ecto target (v0.4)
  • Multi-target fan-out (v0.4)
  • Backpressure tuning knobs beyond Broadway defaults (v0.5)

3. Non-negotiable design rules

These override any other consideration. If an implementation choice violates one of these, the choice is wrong.

  1. Correctness over throughput. Position update is atomic with read-model write inside a single Ecto.Multi. No exceptions.
  2. Per-stream ordering is preserved. All events for a given stream_id route to the same worker via consistent hashing. Within a worker, events are processed serially.
  3. No clever metaprogramming. The __using__ macro generates a thin module. No DSL. No AST manipulation beyond what defmacro gives you naturally.
  4. Boring, supervised OTP. A projection is a module. A worker is a process under a known supervisor. The supervision tree is inspectable in :observer and tells the truth about runtime structure.
  5. No magic dependencies. Deps for v0.1 are listed in §11. Adding one requires justification. Removing one is fine.
  6. The five-line API is the contract. See §4. If a feature requires breaking that API, the feature is wrong, not the API.

4. Public API surface (frozen for v0.1)

4.1 The user-facing projection module

defmodule MyApp.Projections.Orders do
  use Scriba.Projection,
    name: "orders",
    source: {Scriba.Source.Commanded, application: MyApp.CommandedApp},
    target: {Scriba.Target.Ecto, repo: MyApp.Repo},
    parallelism: 16

  def handle(%OrderPlaced{} = event, _meta) do
    {:insert, %OrderReadModel{
      id: event.order_id,
      customer_id: event.customer_id,
      status: "pending"
    }}
  end

  def handle(%OrderShipped{order_id: id}, _meta) do
    {:update, OrderReadModel, [id: id], set: [status: "shipped"]}
  end

  def handle(_event, _meta), do: :skip
end

:version defaults to 1 and is usually omitted; :partition_by defaults to :stream_id (the only value supported in v0.1). use Scriba.Projection enforces required options at compile time and emits a warning if :name matches the legacy "_v<integer>" suffix pattern (per §5, version belongs in its own option, not in the name).

4.2 Handler return contract

A handler must return one of:

  • {:insert, schema_struct} — insert one row
  • {:update, schema_module, filter_keyword, [set: keyword]} — update by filter
  • {:delete, schema_module, filter_keyword} — delete by filter
  • {:multi, ecto_multi} — user-supplied Ecto.Multi for arbitrary work
  • :skip — event acknowledged, no side effect
  • {:error, reason} — explicit failure (routes to dead-letter, see §9)

Raising an exception is also valid and is treated as {:error, exception}.

The engine wraps the returned operation in an Ecto.Multi together with the position update, then calls Repo.transaction/1. If the transaction fails, the event goes to dead-letter; the worker continues.

The meta map

The second argument to handle/2 is a map with these keys:

KeyTypeProvenancePurpose
:idString.t()Source-adapter-suppliedStable event identifier (Commanded UUID, ExESDB id, etc.). Use for idempotency keys, dead-letter correlation, audit trails. Globally unique in well-formed event streams.
:stream_idString.t()Source-adapter-suppliedAggregate / partition identifier. Events with the same stream_id route to the same processor and are handled in source order (§3 rule 2).
:positionnon_neg_integer()Source-adapter-suppliedEvent ordering. Scriba uses this internally for ordered consumption — for cursor tracking, source-side dedup, and safe_position. Not a stable identifier; do not use for idempotency keys.
:typeString.t()Source-adapter-suppliedEvent type name (e.g. "OrderPlaced"). Useful for telemetry filtering or routing within a single handle/2 clause.
:metadatamap()Source-adapter-supplied (may be %{})Arbitrary per-event metadata from the source — correlation IDs, causation IDs, user info, etc. Pass-through; Scriba does not interpret it.
:occurred_atDateTime.t()Source-adapter-suppliedEvent-time timestamp from the source. Use for time-windowed projections; do not assume monotonicity across the source.

:id and :position answer different questions. :id answers "is this the same event I saw before?" (idempotency). :position answers "where is this event in the stream?" (ordering). They are independent: replays and crash recovery may re-deliver the same :id at the same :position; partitioning or out-of-order delivery can never re-deliver the same :id at a different :position because in well-formed event streams :id is globally unique and :position is determined by the source.

4.3 Top-level functions

Scriba.start_projection(MyApp.Projections.Orders)
Scriba.start_projection(MyApp.Projections.Orders, parallelism: 32)   # runtime override
Scriba.pause(MyApp.Projections.Orders)
Scriba.resume(MyApp.Projections.Orders)
Scriba.stop(MyApp.Projections.Orders)
{:ok, info} = Scriba.info(MyApp.Projections.Orders)
projections = Scriba.list()

Every lifecycle function accepts either a projection module (reads identity from the module's compile-time __scriba_config__/0) or a string name with implicit version 1 (Scriba.pause("orders")) or explicit (name, version) (Scriba.pause("orders", 2)). The module form is refactor-safe; the string form is for operator workflows that only know the projection's name.

Scriba.start_projection/2's overrides keyword rejects :name and :version with ArgumentError — identity is compile-time. To run a new projection with a different version, declare a separate module with version: 2. Identity-overriding at runtime would silently create a different projection, almost always a bug.

Scriba.info/1 returns a Scriba.Info struct with :name, :version, :status, :source, :target, :safe_position, :stream_positions. Lag and throughput are NOT in v0.1 — they live in telemetry consumers.

Scriba.list/0 returns [%{name, version, state}] for projections currently registered in Scriba.Registry, including those in :stopped state.

Scriba.rebuild/2, Scriba.swap!/1, Scriba.reset/1 are stubs that raise Scriba.NotImplementedError in v0.1. Document that explicitly.


5. Naming: name vs version

This is a deliberate departure from the "orders_v1" string-suffix pattern used by commanded_ecto_projections.

  • name is the logical projection identity. String. e.g. "orders".
  • version is an integer, default 1. Bumping it creates a separate projection that runs side-by-side with the old one until the user cuts over.

Position is tracked per (name, version) pair. Telemetry tags carry both. The dashboard groups by name and shows versions as siblings.


6. Supervision tree

Scriba.Application
 Scriba.Supervisor (one_for_one)
     Scriba.Registry (Registry, keys: :unique  public addresses)
     Scriba.Internals.Registry (Registry, keys: :unique  Broadway internals)
     Scriba.Projections.Supervisor (DynamicSupervisor)
         per projection (added via Scriba.start_projection/1):
             Scriba.Projection.Supervisor (rest_for_one)
                 Scriba.Projection.Coordinator (gen_statem)
                 Scriba.Projection.Pipeline (Broadway)

6.1 Why these choices

  • Registry with unique keys. Lookup of coordinator pid by projection name. Standard.
  • DynamicSupervisor at the projections layer. Projections are added at runtime via start_projection/1. They are not declared at compile time in the application's supervision tree.
  • rest_for_one for the per-projection subtree. If the Coordinator dies (state corruption), the pipeline must restart with it. If the pipeline dies, the Coordinator survives — its internal lifecycle state is intact.
  • gen_statem for the Coordinator with :handle_event_function callback mode. Lifecycle is genuinely a state machine: :idle → :running → :paused → :draining → :stopped. State-entry hooks via enter events keep pipeline start/stop logic clean. See §7.
  • No singleton Scriba.PositionStore GenServer. Position lives in Postgres (authoritative) with an ETS cache per projection. See §8. The original design's PositionStore process is removed — it was a bottleneck.

6.2 Process registration

Coordinators register as {:via, Registry, {Scriba.Registry, {:coordinator, name, version}}}. Broadway pipelines register as {:via, Registry, {Scriba.Registry, {:pipeline, name, version}}}.

6.3 Telemetry event surface (v0.1)

Four events fire from Scriba.Projection.Pipeline. Lag and throughput events are explicitly v0.2 (see §2) — do not add them here without amending that section.

EventEmitterMeasurementsMetadata
[:scriba, :projection, :event, :start]handle_message/3 via :telemetry.span/3monotonic_time, system_timeprojection, event_type, stream_id, position, telemetry_span_context
[:scriba, :projection, :event, :stop]sameduration, monotonic_timesame as :start
[:scriba, :projection, :event, :exception]sameduration, monotonic_timestart metadata + kind, reason, stacktrace
[:scriba, :projection, :batch, :stop]handle_batch/4 (manual :telemetry.execute/3, success branch only)duration, batch_sizeprojection
[:scriba, :projection, :dead_letter]handle_batch/4 (one per dead-lettered event, emitted AFTER Multi commit)system_timeprojection, position, stream_id, event_type, error_kind
[:scriba, :projection, :started]Scriba.Projection.Coordinator (first :initializing → :running, fires once per Coordinator-process lifetime; Pipeline DOWN→re-running does NOT re-fire)system_timeprojection
[:scriba, :projection, :paused]Scriba.Projection.Coordinator (on :running → :paused, after source pause signal sent)system_timeprojection
[:scriba, :projection, :resumed]Scriba.Projection.Coordinator (on :paused → :running, after source resume signal sent)system_timeprojection

Conventions:

  • projection is %{name: String.t(), version: pos_integer()}.
  • event_type is event.type (source-adapter-supplied; e.g. "OrderPlaced").
  • The exception event uses Erlang's span shape — kind / reason / stacktrace in metadata, not measurements. :telemetry.span/3 re-raises after emission, so Broadway still observes the failure and marks the message. Phase C items 2 (retry) and 3 (dead-letter) will wrap outside this span to intercept before Broadway's default failure path.
  • Source-side dedup (§9.x) returns :skip without emitting per-event telemetry — there was no handler call to measure. A separate [:scriba, :projection, :event, :skipped] event can be added if dedup visibility becomes operationally interesting.
  • Batch :stop is emitted only on the success branch (Multi committed). Batch-failure observability is a hypothetical [:scriba, :projection, :batch, :exception] event, not implemented in v0.1. batch_size counts messages Broadway saw, including those whose handler returned :skip — they consumed pipeline capacity.

One additional event predates Phase C: [:scriba, :projection, :cache_initialized] fires from Scriba.Position.init_cache/3 with measurements %{wiped_count, preloaded_count} and metadata %{name, version, source} where source is :postgres or :empty.


7. The Coordinator state machine

Scriba.Projection.Coordinator is a gen_statem with callback mode [:handle_event_function, :state_enter].

7.1 States

  • :initializing — coordinator started; polling for Pipeline producer registration. Brief transient state; transitions to :running automatically once the producer is up.
  • :running — Pipeline is live, producer is monitored, events flow source → processors → batchers → target.
  • :paused — source has been signaled to stop yielding new events. Pipeline tree stays alive (processors, batchers, target state all intact); in-flight events finish their commit lifecycle. Coordinator alive; position frozen modulo in-flight settle.
  • :draining — pipeline received stop signal, finishing in-flight batch
  • :stopped — terminal; supervisor will not restart

7.2 Transitions

:initializing -- producer registered --> :running
:running      -- pause                --> :paused
:paused       -- resume               --> :running
:running      -- stop                 --> :draining --> :stopped
:paused       -- stop                 --> :stopped     (direct terminate)
:running      -- Pipeline DOWN        --> :initializing (rest_for_one respawn)
any           -- crash                --> (supervisor restarts to :initializing, then auto-:running)

:running → :paused is a held-demand transition (Phase C item 4), not stop-and-restart. The Coordinator calls Source.pause/1 on the Broadway producer pid — the source flips a paused: true flag in its GenStage state and accumulates demand without dispatching. The Pipeline tree (processors, batchers, target state) stays alive. Resume reverses the signal; accumulated demand drains from the source's queue.

Illegal command/state combos return {:error, {:invalid_state, state}} with no idempotency — pause on :paused and resume on :running are errors, not no-ops. Callers wanting idempotent semantics check Scriba.info/2 first or pattern-match the matching-state error case as success.

7.3 State data

Keep the Coordinator's state struct small:

%{
  name: String.t(),
  version: pos_integer(),
  source_spec: tuple(),
  target_spec: tuple(),
  parallelism: pos_integer(),
  pipeline_pid: pid() | nil,
  pipeline_ref: reference() | nil
}

Position lives in Postgres + ETS. Metrics live in :counters. Neither belongs in the Coordinator.

7.4 Pipeline supervision

The Coordinator does NOT supervise the Broadway pipeline directly. The pipeline is a sibling under the projection's rest_for_one supervisor. The Coordinator monitors the pipeline pid via Process.monitor/1 for observation only — restart is the supervisor's job, not the Coordinator's.

7.5 Periodic timers — state_timeout is the wrong primitive

This note is load-bearing for v0.2's lag/throughput work. Recording it here so the implementation does not re-discover it under load.

gen_statem's state_timeout action resets on every event in that state. The Coordinator already uses state_timeout for the pipeline-pid lookup poll (one-shot, re-armed only when the lookup returns :pending) — that pattern is correct because the timer is event-driven, not periodic.

A periodic timer (e.g. "emit lag every 1s") cannot use state_timeout: under any non-trivial event load in :running, the timer is reset before it fires and the emission silently stops. This fails open in tests (low event volume → timer fires) and fails closed in production (high event volume → timer never fires). The kind of subtle bug that hides for months.

For periodic timers in the Coordinator, use either:

  • Process.send_after(self(), :tick, interval_ms) self-message, re-armed in the :info handler, OR
  • :erlang.start_timer/3 with explicit reference tracking.

Both are independent of state-event flow. The send_after pattern is shorter and matches how Broadway emits its own periodic events.


8. Position tracking

8.1 Authoritative storage: Postgres

CREATE TABLE scriba_positions (
  projection_name varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  projection_version int NOT NULL,
  position bigint NOT NULL,
  updated_at timestamptz NOT NULL DEFAULT now(),
  PRIMARY KEY (projection_name, projection_version)
);

The Ecto migration is provided by Scriba.Migrations.up/0 and down/0. Users invoke it from their own migration file.

8.2 Atomic update with read-model write

Every event commit looks like:

Multi.new()
|> apply_handler_result(handler_return)            # user's intent
|> Multi.update_all(:scriba_position, position_query, set: [position: new_pos])
|> Repo.transaction()

If the transaction fails, neither the read-model write nor the position update is applied. The event is retried (via Broadway re-delivery) or routed to dead-letter after N failures.

8.3 ETS cache layer

One ETS table per projection, created when the Coordinator enters :running:

:ets.new(table_name, [
  :set, :public, :named_table,
  {:write_concurrency, true},
  {:read_concurrency, true},
  {:decentralized_counters, true}
])

Workers update the cache after a successful commit. The cache is not authoritative — it is a hot-read optimization for Scriba.info/1 and (in v0.2) the lag calculator. On Coordinator restart, the cache is rebuilt from Postgres in the :idle → :running transition.

8.4 No PositionStore process

There is no GenServer mediating position reads or writes. Workers write directly to Postgres (inside their Multi) and to the ETS cache. Readers (info, telemetry) read from ETS first, fall back to Postgres on miss.


9. Error handling and dead-letter

A handler can fail three ways:

  1. Returns {:error, reason} — explicit
  2. Raises — implicit, caught and converted to {:error, exception}
  3. The Multi transaction fails — DB-level error

All three route to a dead-letter table:

CREATE TABLE scriba_dead_letters (
  id bigserial PRIMARY KEY,
  projection_name varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  projection_version int NOT NULL,
  position bigint NOT NULL,
  stream_id varchar(255),
  event_type varchar(255),
  event_data jsonb NOT NULL,
  error_kind varchar(64) NOT NULL,
  error_message text,
  error_stacktrace text,
  occurred_at timestamptz NOT NULL DEFAULT now()
);

9.1 Retry policy

Default: 3 attempts with exponential backoff (100ms, 1s, 10s) before dead-lettering. Configurable per projection via retry: [max_attempts: N, backoff: [...]]. retry: false opts out — one attempt, immediate dead-letter on failure.

What retries: {:error, _} handler returns AND raised exceptions (per §4.2 "Raising is treated as {:error, exception}"). Same backoff schedule for both.

What doesn't retry: Multi-transaction failures (case 3 in §9 above) leave the batch unacked; the source re-delivers later. From the retry policy's perspective this is "batch never started" — the per-event retry counter doesn't increment for case-3 failures.

Implementation: in-handler retry loop with Process.sleep/1 between attempts. Sleeping inside handle_message blocks ONE processor (per-partition); other processors continue independently, and the batcher keeps shipping batches via batch_timeout. Per-stream ordering is preserved within the stuck processor's partition. Pipeline restart during sleep resets the retry counter to 0 via source re-delivery from the durable cursor — no per-message retry state to persist. This is the right primitive (vs Process.send_after/3, which doesn't fit Broadway's processor model).

Backoff list semantics: entries are the sleeps BETWEEN attempts. N attempts need N-1 sleeps, so length(backoff) >= max_attempts - 1 is validated at projection start. Default [100, 1000, 10000] over-provisions one entry — the third is unused at default max_attempts: 3 but available if max_attempts is bumped to 4 without overriding backoff.

Telemetry: each retry attempt re-invokes :telemetry.span/3, producing its own :event :start / :event :stop / :event :exception triple. Operators counting :event :start events per event_id can detect retry activity. No dedicated :event :retry event in v0.1.

Dead-letter after exhaustion: the final failure result (original {:error, _} or {:exception, _, _}) is what routes to dead-letter, unchanged. No "retry_exhausted" wrapper — error_kind reflects the actual failure cause. The retry layer is transparent to dead-letter routing (§9 case 1 and case 2 paths).

9.2 The crucial choice: skip and continue

When an event is dead-lettered, the position advances past it. This is deliberate. The alternative — blocking the projection until the bad event is resolved — is the #2 complaint on ElixirForum after lag visibility. Users can replay dead-letters manually via a function provided in v0.2.

Document this clearly in the README. It's a sharp edge but the right default.

9.3 Telemetry on dead-letter

Emit [:scriba, :projection, :dead_letter] with metadata {name, version, position, stream_id, event_type, error_kind} so operators can alert on it.


10. Property tests (mandatory for v0.1)

Use StreamData. These three properties are non-negotiable.

10.1 P1 — Per-stream ordering

For any stream S, the sequence of events delivered to handle/2 is a prefix of the source order for S.

Generator: lists of events with monotonic per-stream sequence numbers, multiple streams interleaved. Assertion: handler-observed sequence numbers are monotonic per stream.

10.2 P2 — Position monotonicity

Across the whole projection, the committed position in Postgres is monotonically non-decreasing across all observed states.

Generator: arbitrary event streams. Assertion: Scriba.info/1 position never goes backward across reads, including across simulated worker crashes.

10.3 P3 — Effectively-once under crash

For each event, the handler's effect appears in the target exactly once after recovery from arbitrary crash schedules.

Generator: (events, crash_schedule) pairs where crash_schedule injects Process.exit/2 at random points in the pipeline. Test target: in-memory Scriba.Target.Test that records every {event_id, position} it commits. Assertion: deduped recorded list equals input event list.

If P3 fails, do not ship. Everything else is negotiable; this one is the property that justifies Scriba's existence.


11. Dependencies

defp deps do
  [
    {:broadway, "~> 1.1"},
    {:ecto_sql, "~> 3.11"},
    {:postgrex, "~> 0.17"},
    {:telemetry, "~> 1.2"},
    {:jason, "~> 1.4"},

    # dev/test only
    {:commanded, "~> 1.4", optional: true},
    {:stream_data, "~> 1.0", only: [:dev, :test]},
    {:ex_doc, "~> 0.31", only: :dev, runtime: false},
    {:credo, "~> 1.7", only: [:dev, :test], runtime: false},
    {:dialyxir, "~> 1.4", only: [:dev], runtime: false}
  ]
end

Notes:

  • :commanded is optional: true — Scriba should compile and run without it. Only Scriba.Source.Commanded requires it; that module guards with Code.ensure_loaded?/1.
  • No :gen_state_machine. Use Erlang's built-in :gen_statem directly. One less dep.
  • No metrics library. Telemetry events only. v0.2 adds telemetry_metrics.

12. File layout

scriba/
 .formatter.exs
 .gitignore
 CHANGELOG.md
 LICENSE                       # Apache-2.0
 README.md
 mix.exs
 lib/
    scriba.ex                 # public API: start_projection, pause, resume, info, list
    scriba/
       application.ex
       supervisor.ex
       registry.ex
       projection.ex         # the __using__ macro + behaviour
       projections/
          supervisor.ex     # DynamicSupervisor
       projection/
          supervisor.ex     # rest_for_one per projection
          coordinator.ex    # gen_statem
          pipeline.ex       # Broadway module
       source.ex             # behaviour
       source/
          commanded.ex
       target.ex             # behaviour
       target/
          ecto.ex
          test.ex           # in-memory, for property tests
       position.ex           # functions over Postgres + ETS, no process
       dead_letter.ex
       partitioner.ex        # consistent hash logic
       telemetry.ex          # event-catalog moduledoc; no runtime code
       telemetry/
          handler.ex        # default-handler slot (no-op in v0.1)
       migrations.ex         # up/0, down/0 for users to call
       errors.ex             # Scriba.NotImplementedError, etc.
 test/
     test_helper.exs
     support/
        repo.ex
        test_events.ex
        test_projection.ex
     scriba/
        projection_test.exs
        coordinator_test.exs
        partitioner_test.exs
        source/
           commanded_test.exs
        target/
            ecto_test.exs
     property/
         ordering_test.exs       # P1
         monotonicity_test.exs   # P2
         crash_recovery_test.exs # P3

Do not add files outside this layout without justification. Do not create empty placeholder files for future versions.


13. Behaviours

13.1 Scriba.Source

@callback child_spec(opts :: keyword()) :: Supervisor.child_spec()
@callback start_link(opts :: keyword()) :: GenServer.on_start()

# Broadway producer interface — Source modules implement
# Broadway.Producer behaviour and yield events as
# %Broadway.Message{data: %Scriba.Event{}, acknowledger: ...}

Scriba.Event struct:

%Scriba.Event{
  id: String.t(),            # globally unique event id
  stream_id: String.t(),     # used for partitioning
  type: String.t(),          # event type name
  data: term(),              # decoded event struct
  metadata: map(),
  position: non_neg_integer(),  # global stream position
  occurred_at: DateTime.t()
}

Resume semantics on Pipeline restart

When the Pipeline is restarted — through Coordinator.pause/2 + Coordinator.resume/2, or as part of rest_for_one recovery from a Pipeline-or-source crash — Broadway's tree is torn down and rebuilt, and a fresh source process is spawned via the source's start_link/1.

The new source starts with whatever resume point its adapter computes on init. For the in-process Test source (test/support/test_source.ex), the resume point is the :start_from opt, which defaults to 0 — i.e. replay-from-zero on every Pipeline restart unless the caller explicitly passes a cursor.

For production sources, the resume point should come from the source's own server-side subscription state, not from Scriba:

  • Scriba.Source.Commanded calls subscribe_to(_, _, name, _, :origin) with a stable subscription name. Commanded's event store persists that subscription's acked position; on Pipeline restart, the re-subscription resumes from the persisted position.
  • Future adapters (e.g. ExESDB) follow the same pattern — server-side subscription state is the source of truth for "where this projection has consumed up to."

Pipeline-side source dedup is the correctness safety net independent of the source adapter's resume behaviour: even when a source redelivers events whose position is at or below the projection's committed cursor (e.g. because the source restarted before its own ack reached the server), the Pipeline's handle_message/3 checks Scriba.Position.cache_get/4 and returns :skip for any already-committed event. The handler is not invoked, the read model is untouched, the cursor does not advance.

The two layers compose deliberately:

  1. Adapter-level resume minimizes redelivery cost — server-side subscriptions mean only events past the cursor are sent over the wire.
  2. Pipeline-side dedup is the correctness guarantee — even a buggy or naive adapter that replays from zero on every restart cannot violate exactly-once at the read model.

PD3 (real-Postgres property test, 100 iterations) verifies adapter-level resume end-to-end against the Test source's :start_from filter. The fast-suite integration test in test/scriba/projection/pipeline_test.exs verifies Pipeline-side dedup by killing the Pipeline child (which kills the source) and observing that the new source's replay-from-zero produces no duplicate read-model rows.

13.2 Scriba.Target

@callback init(opts :: keyword()) :: {:ok, state :: term()}
@callback apply_batch(
            events :: [Scriba.Event.t()],
            handler_results :: [term()],
            projection :: %{name: String.t(), version: pos_integer()},
            new_position :: non_neg_integer(),
            state :: term()
          ) :: {:ok, state} | {:error, reason :: term(), state}

The target is responsible for the atomic write. The Ecto target builds the Multi; the Test target appends to an Agent. The engine treats them uniformly via this callback.


14. What "done" looks like for v0.1

Checklist for shipping 0.1.0:

  • [ ] All files in §12 exist and are non-empty
  • [ ] mix compile --warnings-as-errors is clean
  • [ ] mix credo --strict passes
  • [ ] mix dialyzer passes
  • [ ] mix test passes including the three property tests in §10
  • [ ] mix docs generates without warnings
  • [ ] README has: install, 5-line example, link to design doc, scope
    statement (what Scriba is/is not from §1)
  • [ ] CHANGELOG has a 0.1.0 entry
  • [ ] LICENSE is Apache-2.0
  • [ ] mix hex.build succeeds
  • [ ] A working example app in examples/ consumes a real Commanded
    event store and runs a real projection end-to-end

The example app is the acceptance test. If mix run on the example does not show a projection catching up to a Commanded event store with telemetry firing, v0.1 is not done.


15. Anti-goals (things to actively resist)

These are real failure modes for this kind of project. The following are non-negotiable architectural commitments:

  • A configuration DSL beyond keyword lists.
  • A "plugin system" beyond the Source/Target behaviours.
  • Any abstraction that requires reading more than two modules to understand a single event's flow from source to target.
  • "Helpful" defaults that hide important failure modes (e.g. silent retry forever, swallowed exceptions, magic position recovery).
  • Premature performance optimization. Correctness first; the benchmarks happen in v0.5.
  • Compile-time projection registration. Projections are added at runtime via start_projection/1. The application supervisor knows nothing about user projections.

16. References