[darkr]

Total ordering is rarely required, and even more rarely actually possible (without lamport or atomic clocks etc).

For more common use cases it is possible to provide the minimum guarantees required to reliably reconstruct a domain object throughout a distribute system whilst still providing a fuck-ton of scope for concurrency, batching and high throughput through better partition key choice, informed by:

A: The maximum ordering guarantees that can be provided by the data source

B: the minimum ordering guarantees required to reconstruct a domain object