Cloud Computing Lets Us Rethink How We Use Data
But not everything we do in a database needs guaranteed transactional consistency.
Imagine you are charged with designing a system to collect data on temperature, air flow and electricity use in a building every few minutes from hundreds of locations. The system will be used to make the building more energy efficient. Now imagine you lose a few data points every day. The cause isn’t important but it could be a glitch with a sensor, a dropped packet, or an incomplete write operation in the database.
Do you care?
It depends from what angle I’m looking at this question. If I’m the producer of the sensor, I do care if it has a glitch. If I’m a network administrator I do care there are dropped packets. And if I am a database system I do care if I’m dropping write operations. And I also have to tell whoever is using me if I am able to receive operations—am I available when I’m needed?
Original title and link: Cloud Computing Lets Us Rethink How We Use Data (©myNoSQL)
