Ajax Patterns and Best Practices

Chapter 10. Infinite Data Pattern

Intent

The purpose of the Infinite Data pattern is to manage and display data that is seemingly infinite, in a timely manner.

Motivation

Databases have become very large and are growing by the day. For example, Google (the corporation) has databases so large that managing them literally requires thousands of computers. In the late nineties, the prevailing idea was to buy a very large computer with a dozen or so CPUs that would manage thousands of transactions. The question in the nineties was how to keep one or two or even four of those computers running. In the new millennium, the question has become how to manage the databases that have been building over the decades.

Many companies today have databases that cannot ...