I still feel the canonical answer to "what should my default data management policy in write-some-read-a-ton situations" is to, at write time: 1) store an

I still feel the canonical answer to "what should my default data management policy in write-some-read-a-ton situations" is to, at write time: 1) store an appropriate write-whole/data-mining-friendly format 2) ASAP, for each major view, write out a Redis-style O(1)-to-read data structure 3) think carefully about backup and replay strategies You trade a slightly stale read of the very hottest data for much improved performance on everything else, and more importantly, much simplified view code. The best reference I have found for this pattern, and it isn't great (too big-SQL-centric), is "command-query-responsibility segregation": http://www.udidahan.com/2009/12/09/clarified-cqrs/ http://www.udidahan.com/2009/12/09/clarified-cqrs/