What is an idempotent operation?

Question

What is an idempotent operation?

Answer 1

An idempotent operation can be repeated an arbitrary number of times and the result will be the same as if it had been done only once. In arithmetic, adding zero to a number is idempotent.

Idempotence is talked about a lot in the context of "RESTful" web services. REST seeks to maximally leverage HTTP to give programs access to web content, and is usually set in contrast to SOAP-based web services, which just tunnel remote procedure call style services inside HTTP requests and responses.

REST organizes a web application into "resources" (like a Twitter user, or a Flickr image) and then uses the HTTP verbs of POST, PUT, GET, and DELETE to create, update, read, and delete those resources.

Idempotence plays an important role in REST. If you GET a representation of a REST resource (eg, GET a jpeg image from Flickr), and the operation fails, you can just repeat the GET again and again until the operation succeeds. To the web service, it doesn't matter how many times the image is gotten. Likewise, if you use a RESTful web service to update your Twitter account information, you can PUT the new information as many times as it takes in order to get confirmation from the web service. PUT-ing it a thousand times is the same as PUT-ing it once. Similarly DELETE-ing a REST resource a thousand times is the same as deleting it once. Idempotence thus makes it a lot easier to construct a web service that's resilient to communication errors.

Further reading: RESTful Web Services, by Richardson and Ruby (idempotence is discussed on page 103-104), and Roy Fielding's PhD dissertation on REST. Fielding was one of the authors of HTTP 1.1, RFC-2616, which talks about idempotence in section 9.1.2.

Answer 2

No matter how many times you call the operation, the result will be the same.

Answer 3

A good example of understanding an idempotent operation might be locking a car with remote key.

log(Car.state) // unlocked

Remote.lock();
log(Car.state) // locked

Remote.lock();
Remote.lock();
Remote.lock();
log(Car.state) // locked

lock is an idempotent operation. Even if there are some side effect each time you run lock, like blinking, the car is still in the same locked state, no matter how many times you run lock operation.

Answer 4

my 5c: In integration and networking the idempotency is very important. Several examples from real-life: Imagine, we deliver data to the target system. Data delivered by a sequence of messages. 1. What would happen if the sequence is mixed in channel? (As network packages always do :) ). If the target system is idempotent, the result will not be different. If the target system depends of the right order in the sequence, we have to implement resequencer on the target site, which would restore the right order. 2. What would happen if there are the message duplicates? If the channel of target system does not acknowledge timely, the source system (or channel itself) usually sends another copy of the message. As a result we can have duplicate message on the target system side. If the target system is idempotent, it takes care of it and result will not be different. If the target system is not idempotent, we have to implement deduplicator on the target system side of the channel.

Answer 5

retry-safe.

Is usually the easiest way to understand its meaning in computer science.

Answer 6

An idempotent operation produces the result in the same state even if you call it more than once, provided you pass in the same parameters.