Source of Truth

Noun · Development

Definitions

  1. The authoritative system or dataset that is considered the definitive, canonical reference for a particular piece of information, from which all other representations are derived or synchronized. When discrepancies arise between systems, the source of truth is what you trust.

    In plain English: The one place everyone agrees has the most correct and up-to-date version of the information.

    Example: "The user service's Postgres database is the source of truth for account data — the Elasticsearch index is just a read replica."

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