The demand for high volumes of data has increased the need for databases that can handle both data ingestion and querying with the lowest possible latency (aka high performance). To meet this demand, database designs have shifted to prioritize minimal work during ingestion and querying, with other tasks being performed in the background as post-ingestion and pre-query.
This article will describe those tasks and how to run them in a completely different server to avoid sharing resources (CPU and memory) with servers that handle data loading and reading.
The tasks that can proceed after the completion of data ingestion and before the start of data reading will differ depending on the design and features of a database. In this post, we describe the three most common of these tasks: data file merging, delete application, and data deduplication.