February 2026
Intermediate to advanced
672 pages
21h 56m
English
Content preview from Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
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)
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 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 is no longer sufficient to store everything in one system, and it might be necessary to combine multiple storage or processing systems that provide different capabilities.
We call an application data-intensive if data management is one of the primary challenges in developing the application [1]. While in compute-intensive systems the challenge is parallelizing a very large computation, in data-intensive applications we usually worry more about things like storing and processing ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.