A retail-analytics team is selecting an external source of currency-exchange rates to feed an automated overnight forecasting pipeline. The team's primary concern is availability: the data must refresh at least daily, be programmatically accessible with minimal risk of downtime, and integrate cleanly into an orchestration script. Which option BEST satisfies these availability requirements?
A crowdsourced Google Sheet of rates updated by volunteers whenever changes are noticed.
A commercial subscription that emails password-protected XLSX attachments to subscribers every Monday.
A publicly documented REST API that exposes daily incremental snapshots through versioned endpoints and includes a 99.9 % uptime service-level agreement.
An open-data portal that offers bulk CSV files updated once every quarter.
Availability encompasses how often data is refreshed, whether it can be accessed automatically, and the reliability guarantees the provider offers. A documented REST API that publishes incremental updates every 24 hours and is covered by a 99.9 % uptime SLA delivers frequent refreshes, a machine-readable access method, and contractual reliability-directly matching the pipeline's needs. A quarterly CSV download, weekly emailed spreadsheets, and an ad-hoc crowdsourced Google Sheet all fail on one or more of these dimensions (update frequency, automation, or reliability guarantees), making them less suitable choices.
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