Data Purging

Finite computing resources

It certainly seems like a simple enough principle. Computing resources are always finite; therefore, you cannot continually increase consumption without limit. Still, in the rush of excitement about rolling out a new amazing application, the next great mission-critical, bet-the-company product, data purging always gets assigned to the lowest priority. It certainly doesn’t demo as well, anything demos better than purging, really. It sometimes seems that we’ll be lucky if the system ever runs at all in the real world. The notion that it’ll run long enough to accumulate too much data to handle seems like a “high-class problem,” the kind of problem we’d love to have.

Nevertheless, someday the data bloat will start to affect your product. In the worst case, it’ll start undermining the whole system. Our database will probably complain that nobody understands it, too.