durable entity timeseries

[vigouredelaruse]

the screenshot shows the signal history of a durable entity backed by the mssql storage provider

these are general musings resulting from a consideration of the above visual exhibit

querying the signal history as above exposes the prior states of a data point. this exactly resembles a time series too much to be a coincidence.

that means one could have an entity for a metar station or a river gauge and query its history via the power of the ms sql query engine, 'playing back the tape' at one's leisure

one could in theory deploy orchestrations that consume such time series, with the following considerations

• the durable entity signal history timestamp and the time domain properties of the payload must be decoupled to support out of order operations, such as ingestion operations of 'prior history' payloads
• the sql query operations would be well served by surfacing the json payloads via sql server json query operations separately from the signal history timeseries
• measures need to be taken to work with what would essentially be denormalized data, similar to cosmos db sql model design patterns
• measures must be taken to defend against serialization variability, such as the retirement of json payloads in some future durable entity release

one is reminded of the adage that with c you have the power to shoot yourself in the foot, whereas c++ is better but when you shoot yourself in the foot, you blow your whole leg off

comments?