Immutable data vs mutable data
Inspired by Google system design interview: Design Spotify (with ex-Google EM)
Immutable data mutable datain the trade-off explorer →
An image or a song would be immutable data.
The access pattern for those is a lot of reads, very few writes.
These would be best stored in a system where it's easy to read and stream and store in easily horizontally scalable blob storage systems like AWS S3.
Metadata like where the user stopped listening to the song gets written more often, or ability to search needs a different kind of database.
Sources
- Google system design interview: Design Spotify (with ex-Google EM) inspired this note