Single Sources Of Truth Were Born To Be Single

Information technology lessons for everyday life

realistic digital portrait of a body with a human head, a chicken body, octopus tentacles and lion legs — by DALL·E

In information technology, there is an essential concept known as a single source of truth. It isn’t difficult to grasp, but it isn’t always easy to implement. Or rather, it is tempting to violate the rule. The idea is that all the data used by a model comes only from one place. When it changes, say in a database, it must change everywhere else in the system.

A Simplified Example

A simplified example would be that of a product in an e-commerce shop. A price fluctuation in the database should reflect on every page where the product is displayed. It isn’t hard to comprehend that multiple sources of truth would swiftly lead to chaos: imagine the application used more than one database — not an uncommon practice — and two of them stored the price for an item. Imagine different parts of the website — say the mobile and desktop versions — pulled the price information from various databases. Granted, we could argue the problem only amounts to having to change the data twice instead of once, but anyone can see how this can lead to disaster as the system grows.

Society Is Such A Mess

The concept is exceedingly effective to understand why society is such a mess. Every human tends to be their…