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Showing posts with the label Domain-Driven Design

DDD Aggregates: Solving the N+1 Performance Trap in Large Hierarchies

  It is the quintessential DDD hangover. You spend weeks modeling your domain with experts. You identify a   Distributor   entity that holds a collection of   Orders , which in turn hold   LineItems . It feels semantically correct: an Order cannot exist without a Distributor. You write the code, the tests pass, and you deploy. Three months later, the system hangs whenever a Distributor with 5,000 historical orders tries to open their dashboard. You have fallen into the  Mega-Aggregate Trap . By strictly adhering to the rule that "Aggregates are consistency boundaries," you have inadvertently forced your ORM (Entity Framework Core or Hibernate) to hydrate an entire object graph just to change a user's email address. This post details the root cause of this performance collapse and provides a rigorous architectural pattern to decouple large hierarchies without sacrificing data integrity. The Root Cause: Consistency vs. Transactional Reality The performance is...