Dproper

Dproper is a term used in software engineering to denote a family of design principles and practical patterns aimed at ensuring data integrity and proper resource management in distributed and concurrent systems. The concept emphasizes that software components behave deterministically, handle errors gracefully, and do not leave side effects in an inconsistent state when faced with partial failures or retries.

Core ideas include idempotent operations, explicit data validation, clean resource finalization, and clear provenance of data through traceable processing steps. Dproper also advocates explicit boundaries between components, predictable scheduling, and the use of well-defined, self-describing interfaces that minimize implicit assumptions.

In practice, Dproper-guided architectures favor idempotent endpoints, robust input validation, transactional or compensating updates, and principled backpressure to prevent resource exhaustion. Libraries and frameworks inspired by Dproper often provide tooling for provenance tagging, deterministic logging, and automatic cleanup of resources on error paths.

The term originated in discussions within the systems and data engineering communities to capture a set of best practices for reliable data processing. While not a formal standard, Dproper has been referenced in conference talks and open-source projects seeking to improve reliability in distributed pipelines and microservice ecosystems.

See also: distributed systems, data integrity, idempotence, transactional systems.