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Jochen asked whether the order made sense. It did not -- it followed when things happened to be decided, which after consolidation is fictional anyway since record 5 alone folds decisions taken across a week. Concretely wrong before: the domain statement sat at 8, after five engineering rules; the constitution was scattered across 5, 12 and 17; the tiers landed at 15, 16, 21 and 22 with process records in between. Now it walks: what the mesh is (1-3), its tiers from the bottom up (4-8), what runs on them and how it gets there (9-10), how it is built (11-16), how it is checked (17-18), how we work (19-23). Two things made this safe rather than free. It is a permutation, not a compaction, so the renames go through temporary names -- otherwise two files want one slot and one is lost. And the reference rewrite is a single simultaneous pass, because almost every number moved into a slot another number was vacating; replacing one at a time would have cascaded and pointed things at the wrong record while still resolving. Verified: 284 [ADR NNNN](path) links across the repository, all with matching text and target. The ordering principle is now stated in 19 rather than left implicit -- the repository already said "the numbering is the flow" about its folders, and there was no reason for the records to be the exception.
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status, date, deciders, reconstructed, extends
| status | date | deciders | reconstructed | extends |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| accepted | 2026-08-26 | jochen | false | 0009-modules-and-the-graph.md |
8. A context owns its store, exclusively
Context
ADR 0009 settles what a module declares. This settles what a grant may be, and it is the half that removes things.
how-we-build §4 already says contexts integrate through the record, never through a shared
schema, and states the cost: several domains share one forty-five-table schema, which is why
work belonging to one context keeps having to be implemented in another.
That was written as a principle. Counted, it is thirteen foreign tables belonging to three separate contexts, living in the mesh's own registry database.
Considered options
- A schema per consumer inside a shared database. Namespaced, revocable by dropping the schema, with a cross-context join possible but deliberate. Rejected: it keeps the letter of §4 and leaves the temptation in place, and a boundary that is merely inconvenient to cross gets crossed.
- Read-only roles on another context's store. Rejected for the same reason and one worse: reading another context's tables couples you to its layout exactly as firmly as writing them, and the coupling is invisible until the owner changes a column.
- Exclusive ownership. Chosen.
Decision
A context is granted only what it exclusively owns.
No shared writes. No read-only role on another context's store. If you need what another context holds, you ask it or you subscribe to it.
The unit is the context, not the process. Everything inside a context — its service, its surface, its tools — reads its own store freely. A board showing the mesh's own nodes and modules is the mesh showing its own data, not a boundary crossing. What is forbidden is a different context reading it.
Asking or subscribing is derived, not chosen
ADR 0004 makes disconnection an ordinary situation. So:
- Anything that must keep working while disconnected cannot ask — there is nobody to ask. It keeps a local copy, which means subscribing.
- Anything where a stale answer is worse than none cannot subscribe. A display may lag; a decision about whether a grant is still valid may not.
Neither is a query against another store, whatever transport it travels over.
What this removes
The first clear list of what the design deletes rather than adds:
- Grant kinds. There is one: an exclusive resource. No schema grants, no read roles, no rules about who may see what inside a shared thing.
- The question of who owns which table, and the guessing at revocation time. Removing a consumer drops what it was granted, whole.
- Cross-context migration ordering. Two contexts migrating one database must be ordered against each other. Exclusive ownership means a context's migrations are ordered only against itself.
- A class of permission modelling a shared store would otherwise need.
Consequences
- Cross-context reporting is harder, and that is the point. Anything wanting to see across contexts consumes their events or calls their interfaces. That is §4's argument, and the cost it names is the one already paid.
- A single surface over several contexts still works — that is what a surface is. It reads interfaces, not stores. This holds while the contexts sit behind one interface; splitting a context into its own deployable costs that, and the composition would have nowhere to live that tier 3 permits. A real constraint on how far the control plane may be split.
- Three contexts must move out of the registry database, taking thirteen tables with them. Their dependency on the registry then shrinks to almost nothing — one of them needs a single table.
- The node appliers were already handled. ADR 0005 stopped the host querying the mesh database for tier reasons unrelated to this, and it removes most of the remaining direct readers as a side effect.
- What a consumer does about events missed while disconnected is not decided — replay from a point, ask once and resume, or rebuild. The question every projection has.
References
how-we-build.md§4 — the rule this makes enforceable.- Research 011 — the count, the worked provider, and the dashboard case.
- ADR 0004 — why asking or subscribing is derived.