McCrory — Data Gravity in the Clouds

The 2010 blog post that coined "data gravity." Agent-fetched 2026-06-26 to ground Data Gravity, which had been resting on the human's heuristic alone.

Summary

Dave McCrory introduced "data gravity" as a physical analogy: treat data as a mass that, as it accumulates, exerts a gravitational pull on applications and services. The attractive force is mediated by latency and throughput — proximity to the data means lower latency and higher throughput, which makes applications increasingly reliant on staying close. The decisive asymmetry: "Data if large enough can be virtually impossible to move," so compute gravitates toward the data rather than the data being relocated to the compute. McCrory used Salesforce's Database.com announcement as a contemporary example.

Key claims

• Data accumulates "mass"; more mass → more services/applications attracted to it.
• Latency + throughput are the "accelerators" of the pull (closer = faster = more reliant).
• Large data is effectively immovable, so move the compute, not the data.

Connections

• Data Gravity — confirms the wiki's heuristic ("put compute where the data has gravity; move the small thing to the data") and supplies the originating analogy and the latency/throughput mechanism.
• Choose the Platform by the Hardest Recurring Part — data's immovability is often what makes the data-heavy step the hardest recurring part.
• Do It Once, at the Right Place — gravity is the placement face of the do-it-where-it-belongs principle.

Source

• Original: Dave McCrory, Data Gravitas, 2010-12-07 (source-url above); faithful capture in source-file.