Coarse-grained vs fine-grained

Coarse-grained and Fine-grained both think about optimizing a number of servicess. But the difference is in the level. I like to explain with an example, you will understand easily.

Fine-grained: For example, I have 100 services like findbyId, findbyCategry, findbyName...... so on. Instead of that many services why we can not provide find(id, category, name....so on). So this way we can reduce the services. This is just an example, but the goal is how to optimize the number of services.

Coarse-grained: For example, I have 100 clients, each client have their own set of 100 services. So I have to provide 100*100 total services. It is very much difficult. Instead of that what I do is, I identify all common services which apply to most of the clients as one service set and remaining separately. For example in 100 services 50 services are common. So I have to manage 100*50 + 50 only.

Corse-grained services provides broader functionalities as compared to fine-grained service. Depending on the business domain, a single service can be created to serve a single business unit or specialised multiple fine-grained services can be created if subunits are largely independent of each other. Coarse grained service may get more difficult may be less adaptable to change due to its size while fine-grained service may introduce additional complexity of managing multiple services.

Granularity has an important application while storing large scale data where space is very important.

The meaning of granularity according to Oxford dictionary is -

"The scale or level of detail in a set of data."

According to Cambridge dictionary -

"A lot of small details included in information, making it possible for you to understand very clearly what is happening"

So from the word specific meaning, it is some kind of partition of data for a continuous process.

Finer granularity consists of small interval partition, so that detailed representation can be achieved. On the other hand, coarser granularity is larger frame interval, so that it can save storage.

Uses of two types of granularity is application specific.

For example- If we have an application, where recent time information is more important than the older information. For detailed representation of recent data can be found by finer granularity, while for older data representation we can use coarser granularity.