Chapter 1. Introduction to Real-Time Analytics
It’s a huge competitive advantage to see in real time what’s happening with your data.
Hilary Mason, Founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs
A lot of data in a business environment is considered unbounded because it arrives gradually over time. Customers, employers, and machines produced data yesterday and today and will continue to produce more data tomorrow. This process never ends unless you go out of business, so the dataset is never complete in any meaningful way.
Note
Of the companies that participated in Confluent’s Business Impact of Data Streaming: State of Data in Motion Report 2022, 97% have access to real-time data streams, and 66% have widespread access.
Today, many businesses are adopting streaming data and real-time analytics to make faster, more reliable, and more accurate decisions, allowing them to gain a competitive advantage in their market segment.
This chapter provides an introduction to streaming and real-time analytics. We’ll start with a refresher about streaming data before explaining why organizations want to apply analytics on top of that data. After going through some use cases, we’ll conclude with an overview of the types of real-time analytics applications we can build.
What Is an Event Stream?
The term streaming describes a continuous, never-ending flow of data. The data is made available incrementally over time, which means that you can act upon it without needing to wait for the whole dataset to ...