In this article I want to talk about an architectural pattern called Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS). I will use an example to illustrate this pattern based on a recent problem we had at the company I work for and how we solved that problem. The system in question is an automated payment processor and runs on a schedule through the night and collects payments from our customers. The original CQRS pattern was written about by Martin Fowler over on his blog.

The concepts behind CQRS are very simple, but they give you some powerful advantages. What CQRS essentially does is get you to use a different model to update information (COMMAND) than the mode you use to read information (QUERY). If you think of a typical layered application you may have a client, a user interface or a background process that communicates with a business logic layer that may be comprised of a static set of libraries, Web Services or REST based services.

This business logic layer acts as a model into your domain that lets you perform operations against that model. These operations generally allow you to create, retrieve, update, or delete data associated with the model. For most scenarios this age old way of working is fine and that is certainly true nowadays. This way of working can cause you problems for systems that need to have high performance and be more scalable.

To illustrate this pattern I will discuss a payment system developed by 2 engineers on my team, Graham Johnson and Hugh Hulme. For the purposes of this article we will call it the Automated Payment System (APS). The actual system itself had a different name but APS will do for the purpose of this article. The system would run through the night and collect payments that where due from our customers. The initial system was completely synchronous and would execute in the following steps: