Data intensive applications

Data intensive applications are applications that handle data on a big or even massive scale. The complexity lies with handling this data from ingestion, transforming and making it readily available.

A user focussed application tends to be data intensive. The user usually expects low latency on requests and thus requires readily available data, in most cases the same user will also generate a lot of data. The generated data could be behaviour based metrics, feature interactions or anything in between.

Even

Another form could be a computationally intensive applications, and they’re not mutually exclusive.

Data correctness is not data-intensive

When you are presenting the same data in different shapes there is complexity in the data-correctness. Being consistent and predictable in data is not easy either.

This is however not a question about scale, and thus not to be confused with data-intensive.

Reference

Kleppmann, Martin, and Chris Riccomini. Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems. Second Edition, O’Reilly Media, 2026.