The single version of the truth approach to record archiving ensures concurrency by having a central or synchronized database. Non-versioning storage methods can cause redundancy and errors. The single version method prevents conflicts but can be costly and vulnerable to crashes.
The one version of the truth approach to record archiving requires a business to have either a central database containing all business records or alternatively a distributed synchronized database that achieves the same goal. Concurrency, i.e. having a single undisputed set of verified information, in business file management is of the utmost importance, ensuring that everyone within an organization is on the same page when it comes to data, records and statistics. A single version of the truth file management scheme enforces concurrency by ensuring that there is only one possible “warehouse” containing company records.
Non-versioning truth file storage methods, where companies risk having redundancy in data storage, can easily become flawed. Imagine a company that stores its information in two separate, unrelated databases: Database A and Database B. Now imagine an employee makes a change to the price of soap in Database A, but forgets to make the corresponding change in Database B. Database concurrency is now in question. From that moment on, no employee who consults the databases will be able to determine the price of the soap. By keeping information in separate warehouses, disagreements between databases cause hard-to-resolve problems.
The single version of the truth method solves this problem by ensuring that there is only one reference location for any given value in the database. Since there is only one “answer”, there can never be any disagreements or conflicts in the system. While this does not preclude data entry errors, which occur when a user mistakenly enters and saves an incorrect value for an element, it does prevent concurrency issues. If a mistake is made, it becomes much easier to fix and fix it.
The single version of data storage truth approaches has its drawbacks. For larger companies, with massive records spanning several decades, storing all information in a single repository can become both cost- and efficiency-prohibitive. Large data storage solutions, such as computers running four or more hard drives on a large scale, are very expensive. Also, maintaining one large database is often more complicated than maintaining multiple smaller databases.
Finally, the centralization of the single version of the truth data storage model is also one of its biggest weaknesses. By compacting all data into a single virtual warehouse, problems with the hard drives that store information or with the computer hosting the drives can severely cripple an organization. If the central database hub crashes, everyone in the entire company will be left “out in the cold” until the system is back online.
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