Although business data is important and the code we design and build should protect its integrity, there are cases in which a pragmatic approach is more desirable.

Especially at high levels of scale, there are cases when data consistency guarantees can be relaxed. Check whether corrupting the state of one record out of 1 million is really a showstopper for the business and whether it can negatively affect the performance and profitability of the business. For example, let’s assume you are building a system that ingests billions of events per day from IoT devices. Is it a big deal if 0.001% of the events will be duplicated or lost?

As always, there are no universal laws. It all depends on the business domain you are working in. It’s OK to “cut corners” where possible; just make sure you evaluate the risks and business implications.