The client I work for at this time is leveraging Axon 3. The events are stored in a PostgreSQL database. PostgreSQL uses a thing called TOAST (The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique) to store large values.
From the PostgreSQL documentation:
“PostgreSQL uses a fixed page size (commonly 8 kB), and does not allow tuples to span multiple pages. Therefore, it is not possible to store very large field values directly. To overcome this limitation, large field values are compressed and/or broken up into multiple physical rows”
As it happens, in our setup using JPA (Hibernate) to store events, the DomainEventEntry entity has a @Lob annotation on the payload and the metaData fields (via extension of the AbstractEventEntry class):
For PostgreSQL this will result in events that are not easily readable:
SELECT payload FROM domainevententry; | payload | | 24153 |
The data type of the payload column of the domainevententry table is OID.
The PostgreSQL JDBC driver obviously knows how to deal with this. The real content is deTOASTed lazily. Using PL/pgSQL it is possible to store a value in a file. But this needs to be done value by value. But when you are debugging your application and want a quick look at the events of your application, this is not a fun route to take.
So we wanted to change the data type in our database to something more human readable. BYTEA for example. Able to store store large values in, yet still readable. As it turned out, a couple changes are needed to get it working.
It took me a while to get all the pieces I needed. Although the solution I present here works for us, perhaps this could not be the most elegant of even the best solution for everyone.
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