How EventStoreDB Supports your Business Processes

EventStoreDB is well-suited to manage and track a wide range of business processes, from simple to sophisticated. While it's designed to handle processes that exhibit all the characteristics below, EventStoreDB is an excellent fit if your business processes demonstrate one or more of these traits.

Business Process Requirement	Processes Descriptions	How EventStoreDB Supports
Auditable and traceable	Processes where every action or change you make is recorded and can be reviewed later, such as financial transactions or compliance checks. For example, you might track all customer interactions in a support system or monitor every step in a food processing plant.	EventStoreDB captures every change in its immutable event log, providing a complete, reliable history, and you can organize events into one of its fine grained streams to support quick event retrieval for analysis. You can also add causation and correlation IDs to events to track the cause and effect of those events.
Distributed and interdependent with multiple systems	Processes where multiple systems, applications, or components rely on one another to complete tasks or functions, requiring coordinated communication and updates. These processes can be difficult to evolve and often face delays and errors due to problems with dependent systems.	EventStoreDB communicates asynchronously with other applications using its connector and subscription subsystem. This is a great way to decouple systems, allowing different parts of your business to scale and evolve independently, while still maintaining seamless communication and coordination between processes.
Reactive to change (Real-time)	Processes that immediately respond to new data or events as they happen, such as updating your account balance right after a transaction, or triggering an alert in your fraud detection system.	Every event captured by EventStoreDB can be delivered to you or your consumer in real-time or on-demand through its connectors or subscription subsystem. This allows you to instantly stream and track events while providing a complete historical record for contextual analysis if you need to replay events.
Support variety of flexible use cases	Processes that possess a variety of basic, alternative, and exceptional flows allow your business to adapt to customer needs and concerns. For example, an ordering system that supports returns, exchanges, pre-ordering, cross-border ordering, gift cards, and store credits.	EventStoreDB’s immutable event log provides visibility across every step of a process, which simplifies troubleshooting and debugging. Events and asynchronous communication allow you to design highly flexible use cases as you can notify various applications and users to handle exceptional use cases as they occur without introducing excessive dependencies. Fine-grained streams allows you to quickly access events from a specific entity or process.
Long-running	Activities that take an extended period to complete often require multiple steps and interactions involving several people or systems. For instance, you might experience this in the ordering process, from placing the order to receiving the delivery.	With EventStoreDB’s durable event log, which persists all events indefinitely, you can easily track long-running business processes. Its sequential and globally ordered structure simplifies the reconciliation of events across different applications over time, allowing you to deploy eventually consistent operations more efficiently and enhance your overall development experience.
Order-sensitive	Order-sensitive (or non-commutative) business processes are workflows where you must follow tasks in a specific sequence to ensure successful execution. For example, a particular order of actions across different accounts triggers an alert in fraud detection. Similarly, generating a global sales report requires consolidating data from multiple sources and currency conversion to USD, which depends on when the foreign exchange rate is updated in the system.	EventStoreDB’s globally consistent event log aggregates events from multiple data sources, making it the de facto source of truth for their ordering when they were not ordered in the first place. This simplifies implementing order-sensitive operations, even when clocks between your applications aren’t synchronized.
Automatable	Repetitive, rule-based tasks that are performed with minimal human intervention using software. Examples include invoice processing, customer onboarding, and inventory management. A common challenge is ensuring your data is consistent and visible across systems due to complex workflows and distributed operations	EventStoreDB’s connector and subscription subsystems allow the streaming or publishing of events to other applications, helping to automate cross-application business processes. The event log ensures resilience, as checkpoints save the last completed actions. If a service fails, it can return to a previously known state rather than starting from scratch.
Adaptable to evolving requirements	Processes designed to change and grow as business requirements, needs, regulations, or market conditions shift. For example, an e-commerce platform may need to modify its inventory management process to handle new trends in product availability or shipping delays, or a financial service provider might have to adjust its loan approval process to meet new compliance requirements	In EventStoreDB, events are immutable facts that don’t change. As requirements evolve, events can be replayed to regenerate read models that align to the new criteria. Additionally, with EventStoreDB, your applications can be more loosely coupled, allowing you to break down large monolithic systems into smaller, independent services. This reduces your upgrade footprint, as only a few services may need updates, lowering the overall risk compared to upgrading an entire monolith.
Compliant with rules, constraints, and regulations	Processes within your organization that follow operational, industry standards, or legal requirements to ensure smooth operations. For example, your financial transactions adhere to banking regulations, and your employee payroll systems comply with labor laws, tax regulations, and your company’s policies on wages and benefits.	EventStoreDB's event log provides a complete and immutable history of changes in your application or auditing requirements. By using optimistic concurrency controls, you can ensure transactional consistency when needed. Additionally, the sequencing and ordering guarantees of events simplify the implementation of eventually consistent operations.
Consistent	Processes with data that you need to keep synchronized across systems, applications, or databases while adhering to business rules and constraints. This ensures that your data remains trustworthy and meaningful for various reports and analysis.	EventStoreDB's event log can act as your application transaction log and historical source of truth, allowing you to reliably synchronize downstream applications eventually, even when different parts of your system are not up to date due to delays or downtime. EventStoreDB's optimistic concurrency control can enforce rules that require immediate consistency without locking or performance penalties.
Performant	Processes that operate efficiently and can handle high demands with minimal delays. For example, you might manage real-time financial transactions, oversee order processing systems, or handle inventory management for many users.	EventStoreDB’s append-only log is optimized for handling write-heavy workloads. You can let other applications or services project events into read models optimized for reading like a cache. You can also use multiple read replicas and subscribers to handle many events.
Scalable	Processes that efficiently handle increased workloads without a significant drop in performance or needing a proportional increase in resources. For example, imagine you're running a global e-commerce retailer that needs to scale to meet peak holiday season traffic.	Applications that use EventStoreDB can be effectively decoupled from other applications, making them more scalable. EventStoreDB supports read replicas to help you scale the number of reads it handles.
Measurable	Processes within your organization that you can track and evaluate, such as a manufacturing process where each step is measured to analyze and optimize for operational efficiency.	EventStoreDB allows the analysis of past actions to identify opportunities for process optimization. By using streams, you can focus on specific criteria and retrieve events based on a particular group (such as manufacturing line #1), a specific date (like January 1st), or a status (such as in-progress or completed).