A queue is a holding area for data or tasks waiting to be processed, used to absorb bursts, retry failures, and decouple systems that run at different speeds.
Category
Data Architecture
Also known as
message queue; processing queue
Queues are one reason real-time is rarely instant: events often pass through a queue before they reach a profile or an activation tool. They make a pipeline resilient, since less data is lost if a downstream system is briefly down, but they also introduce latency you have to account for.
In practice
When a profile update or activation feels slow, look for the queue. The question is not whether one exists but how long it holds data, because that lag is the real gap between an event happening and a campaign being able to act on it.
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