Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition

Glossary

Note

The definitions in this glossary are short and simple, intended to convey the core idea but not the full subtleties of a term. For more detail, follow the references to the main text.

asynchronous

Not waiting for something to complete (e.g., sending data over the network to another node), and not making any assumptions about how long it is going to take. See “Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Replication”, “Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Networks”, and “System Model and Reality”.

atomic

1. In the context of concurrency, describes an operation that appears to take effect at a single point in time, so another concurrent process can never encounter the operation in a “half-finished” state. See also isolation.

2. In the context of transactions, describes grouping together a set of writes that must either all be committed or all be rolled back, even if faults occur. See “Atomicity” and “Two-Phase Commit”.

backpressure

Forcing the sender of data to slow down when the recipient cannot keep up with it. Also known as flow control. See “When an Overloaded System Won’t Recover”.

batch process

A computation that takes a fixed (and usually large) set of data as input and produces other data as output, without modifying the input. See Chapter 11.

bounded

Having a known upper limit or size. Used, for example, in the context of network delay (see “Timeouts and Unbounded Delays”) and datasets (see the introduction to Chapter 12).

Byzantine fault

A fault that ...