Everest has always been a trophy, but now that almost 4,000 people have reached its summit, some more than once, the feat means less than it did a half century ago. Today roughly 90 percent of the climbers on Everest are guided clients, many without basic climbing skills. Having paid $30,000 to $120,000 to be on the mountain, too many callowly expect to reach the summit. A significant number do, but under appalling conditions.
Figure B18.5 shows the three latencies that impact the speed of decision making. These are data, analysis, and decision latencies. Data latency is the time duration to make data ready for analysis, i.e., the time for extracting, transforming, and cleansing the data, and loading it into the database.
The true definition of latency and the latency equation. At a basic level, latency refers to the time delay between when a command is entered and executed. It's the gap between the two. Because latency is all about this gap, it's important to understand what happens after a command is issued.