Question
Reverse the business effect without restoring stale history
Undo is a business decision when other people have moved on.
When it fits
- A workflow partly completed and a simple rollback could overwrite legitimate later work.
When to avoid it
- Some actions cannot be fully reversed. Compensation must respect domain rules, audit history and authorization; never test it on live transactions casually.
A question to ask
Which completed effect needs correction, and which later changes must remain? · Who can authorize the compensating action? · What evidence proves it completed, and what happens if compensation also fails?
Why it matters
Plan compensation around the effect that must be corrected. Restoring an old snapshot can erase concurrent changes. A compensating action may therefore differ from the original action in reverse, and some consequences require manual resolution rather than a pretend rollback.
An example
A partially completed reservation is cancelled through its supported cancellation process; unrelated customer updates are not replaced with an old database snapshot.
Check your result
The recovery plan names the intended post-recovery business state, not merely an old technical state.
Keep this limit in mind
- Some actions cannot be fully reversed. Compensation must respect domain rules, audit history and authorization; never test it on live transactions casually.
Connected ideas
Useful withGive the canary a fair comparison and a real stopping rule
Evidence and sources
A compensating transaction reverses business effects while accounting for concurrent work rather than simply restoring an old snapshot.
Not every effect is reversible; the appropriate compensation and its approval are domain-specific.
Compensating Transaction pattern · Solution