Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Trade-offs in Data Systems Architecture

There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. […] But you try to get the best trade-off you can get, and that’s all you can hope for.

Thomas Sowell, Interview with Fred Barnes (2005)

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This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. The GitHub repo for this book is https://github.com/ept/ddia2-feedback.

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Data is central to much application development today. With web and mobile apps, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud services, it has become normal to store data from many different users in a shared server-based data infrastructure. Data from user activity, business transactions, devices and sensors needs to be stored and made available for analysis. As users interact with an application, they both read the data that is stored, and also generate more data.

Small amounts of data, which can be stored and processed on a single machine, are often fairly easy to deal with. However, as the data volume or the rate of queries grows, it needs to be distributed across multiple machines, which introduces many challenges. As the needs of the application become more complex, it ...