Canonadr

ADR-2026-09-04-17: Account-Centered Spine Schema & Adaptive Growth Standard

Architecture Decision Record establishing the universal Account anchor, departmental and domain taxonomy, inter-domain interaction contracts, and fixed base with adaptive growth.

Status

APPROVED / FOUNDER-CANONICAL

Context

As IntegrateWise ingests data from dozens of disconnected enterprise tools across multiple functional departments (Sales, Customer Success, Support, Product/Engineering, Finance, Communications), the system required a formal architectural standard governing:

  1. How schemas are organized for the entire tenant org and across departments.
  2. How functional domains connect and interact without becoming an unmaintainable peer-to-peer web.
  3. How to balance a stable, predictable base schema with the need for continuous adaptive growth as new tools and custom fields are plugged in.

Decision

  1. Establish Account as the Universal Gravitational Anchor:
    All operational domains link to the Account entity. Peer-to-peer inter-domain links are prohibited in the canonical core; cross-domain relationships must traverse or resolve through the Account hub.

  2. Fixed Invariant Base Schema:
    The base Account entity and its immediate domain satellite contracts are immutable. They define core identity, cross-system external ID maps (salesforce_id, zendesk_id, stripe_id), canonical lifecycle states, and core KPIs.

  3. Inter-Domain Interaction Contracts:
    Inter-domain interactions are governed by formal event and signal propagation rules centered on the Account. For example, a severe support ticket escalation updates Account health, which cascades into CS churn warnings and Revenue renewal risk adjustments.

  4. Adaptive Extensions over Invariant Base:
    Schema evolution is achieved through typed, namespace-isolated extension bags (extensions: Record<string, DomainExtension>). Extensions cannot overwrite, shadow, or mutate base fields. Connectors register custom fields and domain extensions dynamically without altering base queries.

  5. Tenant Isolation Invariant:
    All entities, relations, extensions, and KPIs are strictly partitioned by immutable tenant_id. Cross-tenant data references are architecturally prohibited.

Consequences

  • Guarantees stability for UI projections, AI reasoning, and analytics queries.
  • Connectors can be dynamically added or upgraded without breaking existing schemas.
  • Cross-system data is automatically correlated around the customer story.