When defining an information model, should one favor an abstract or concrete design? The short answer is neither. Generally speaking, the life of any distributed system directly relates to its level of entropy. Furthermore, the level of entropy in a system directly relates to the system’s computational complexity. When designing applications to solve business problems, information storage and retrieval is one of the more important foundational design points. If the information schema is designed without efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in mind then not only will the system perform poorly but it will not meet the requirements imposed by future business demands.

BitVault (defined) is a very interesting distributed data retention platform architecture from Microsoft Research. You can read the research paper here. Another interesting bit of news is an eWeek article documenting a Microsoft announcement of the productizing of BitVault.

A colleague and I discussed the value in using a 64 bit Update Sequence Number (USN) versus a 128 bit USN. Here are my thoughts assuming 64-bits. To provide a bit of context, we were considering a solution space that incremented the USN value for each write operation for a specific set of protected data. The USN is 64 bits, and is advanced for each update on a given server. At 100 writes per second, the USN will roll over in 58,494,241,735 years (approximately).