# Architecture Decision Record: WLDW-20260831

Status: provisional
Validation status: not_validated
Prepared: 2026-08-31
Scope: static vendor-neutral method; no workload run

## Question
How should an authorized representative workload be evaluated to determine when large data needs a warehouse or another candidate family?

## Synthetic classifications
1. `one_off_sanctioned_columnar_extract` → `evaluate_governed_file_workflow`
2. `recurring_shared_governed_analytics` → `evaluate_warehouse_lakehouse_query_service`
3. `recurring_stateful_operational_pipeline` → `evaluate_pipeline_distributed_processing`

Every classification is provisional and not validated. There is no winner.

## Required criteria
- `recurrence_cadence` — Work recurrence, trigger, and freshness cadence
- `consumers_concurrency` — Human and machine consumers, simultaneous demand, and fairness
- `source_of_record` — Authority for inputs, outputs, and corrections
- `ingestion_update` — Batch, incremental, mutation, deletion, late data, and backfill
- `transactional_consistency` — Required atomicity, isolation, snapshots, and cross-table consistency
- `semantic_governance` — Definition ownership, versioning, approval, and change communication
- `query_workload_isolation` — Workload classes, interference, prioritization, and admission
- `security_residency` — Identity, authorization, encryption, network, sensitivity, and location
- `lineage_retention` — Provenance, traceability, holds, deletion, and retention
- `observability_recovery_slo` — Health evidence, failure handling, replay or restore, ownership, and objectives
- `data_movement` — Allowed and prohibited paths among sources, compute, stores, consumers, and regions
- `cost_model` — Charge dimensions, fixed and variable components, operations, and uncertainty
- `team_capability` — Build, secure, operate, review, recovery, and on-call capability

## Evidence boundary
No customer, product, workload execution, measured row count, measured byte volume, runtime, cost, performance, or vendor comparison is included. Final selection requires authorized representative evidence for correctness, execution plans or equivalent evidence, concurrency, recovery, costs, security, and operations.

## Decision
Defer final architecture selection. Preserve all three candidate families for the requirements they can satisfy. Use the independent protocol and a separately governed workload record before changing status.