This talk is a summary of my soon to be released column in ACM Queue titled “Write Amplification versus Read Perspiration”. In this short discussion, we observe that there is a strong pattern in which writing data incurs and obligation to do more work to make it easy to read that data later. We frequently talk about write amplification to describe the extra work we do in many cases to ease reading. We propose the nomenclature read perspiration to describe the challenges reading when we didn’t work hard to organize it.

Bio:
Pat Helland has been implementing transaction systems, databases, application platforms, distributed systems, fault-tolerant systems, and messaging systems since 1978. For recreation, he occasionally writes technical papers. He currently works at Salesforce.