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What is Real-Time Data?
And the rise of data streams
With data flowing and updating from ever more sources, businesses are looking to quickly translate this data into information to make key decisions, usually in an automated way.
Real time data streams have become more popular due to the Internet of Things (IoT), sensors in everyday devices and of course the rise of social media. These platforms provide ever changing states. Analysing them even a day later can give misleading or now currently false information.
Why streaming?
Streaming allows consistent data ingestion. There were a few flaws that prevented real time streaming being ubiquitous in the past.
One major problem was loss of data if there was a fault i.e. the stream was down so no data was being collected.
Another was that real time tools weren’t able to keep up with the velocity — the amount of data that some social networks produce every minute is staggering.
Streaming was an inevitable solution to solve this as you can take data more frequently as it’s produced — think of this as quicker and smaller increments meaning they are easier to manage compared to a huge daily bulk load of data.
