What Is a Streaming Database?

A streaming database is data that is continuously generated from thousands of data sources sent into a data set. This data must be processed and used for various analyses, including correlation, aggregation, filtering, and sampling. Streaming data can include log files generated by users with their mobile or web applications and data from other sources.

The information derived from such analyses allows companies to react quickly if necessary and react immediately to new situations. For example, if a company continuously analyzes social media, it can track the behavior of its customers and their friends and family members, as well as their activities.

One of the benefits of a streaming database is the ability to manage and optimize file systems and object storage, as well as storing scalable data.

Different ways to analyze streaming data 

Imply.io

Imply is the druid manufacturer based on Apache druids and is a powerful tool for visualizing event and data streams.

Imply provides real-time analysis and a data platform supported by Apache Druid and Apache Kafka. Druid can record and store data streams in a shared file system, and users can also interact with Druid from the console. It has a large number of data sources such as Kinesis and Kafka, as well as a variety of analysis tools. 

Druid allows you to store real-time and historical data, i.e., time series, in nature and stream data in a variety of formats such as CSV, XML, JSON, or JSONB. Although there is no user interface for Apache Druid, you do not need to write code to make it work.

Imply.io Benefits

Management & Security

NIX-based environment, including public and private cloud, click here for more information. This implies the use of NIX as the primary operating system in a NIX-centric environment (e.g. Linux, Windows).

Visualization

Imply Pivot is a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows you to perform real-time analysis and visualization of your data with a single click. You can drop, organize, and share important visualizations. Visualizations are fully interactive and support the analysis of data from various sources such as web, mobile, and desktop applications.

Analyze

Apache Druid is a powerful analytics database designed for use in a wide range of applications, from web applications to news buses and mobile applications.

Materialize.io

Materialize is incrementally updated materialized for processing streaming data. It is built upon Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow. 

It supports PostgreSQL and a variety of integration points. It is written in Rust, which is well suited for various types of development-intensive computing and built to be friendly for developers.

Materialize also allows you to ask questions about your data and then get low latency answers, even if the underlying data changes.

Materialize.io Benefits

Real-Time Data Visualizations

Materialize connects you to business intelligence tools, creates your own application dashboards, and creates real-time visualizations. ANSI queries in standard SQL Materialize allows you to easily connect data sources from any data source and connect them to your application.

SQL Development

Materialize is compatible with PostgreSQL.

Fast Results

Materialize provides a stream of real-time information about real-world events, such as weather, traffic, and traffic patterns.

Rockset

Rockset is a real-time indexing database service that serves low – latent, high – analytical queries on a large scale. Converted indexes ™ created in real-time and exposed via a RESTful SQL interface, with support for a wide range of data types such as SQL, JSON and CSV.

Rockset Benefits

Serverless Auto-Scaling in the Cloud

You can use Rockset to automatically scale in the cloud and automate cluster deployment and index management. You’re able to minimize operational overheads through serverless auto-scaling and minimize costs thanks to automating scaling and automating cluster deployment, indexes, management, etc.

Query Lambdas

A Lambdas query calls parameterized SQL queries stored in Rockset and can be executed via special sleep endpoints, but they are also useful for other applications.

With Query Lambdas, you can enforce version control and integrate it into your CI / CD workflow. You can also use it on-the-go, with a single command-line interface (CLI), or even as a standalone application.

Full SQL

Rockset enables you to always retrieve data, change data and execute standard SQL queries, including standard queries for SQL Server, SQLite, and other SQL databases, directly on semi-structured data.

ksqlDB

The new version of ksqlDB is designed to give developers a comfortable RDBMS feel, with the ability to extract data at any time. It’s a bit like SQL Server, but with a bit more performance and a lot more flexibility. The new release of KsqlDB is built in a new way, giving developers a cozy RDBMS feel without having to incur any overhead costs in terms of data at any given time and at any given time.

ksqlDB currently supports push queries and pull queries. Pull queries are most common. It is a form of query issued by a client that retrieves a result as of “now”, similar to a query against a traditional RDBMS. You may find a list of pull queries limitations here. 

ksqlDB Benefits

Streaming ETL pipeline

Streams can be accessed and viewed in a coherent and powerful SQL language using a range of powerful tools.

Materialized cache

This gives you the ability to manage the materialized End-to-End views, and you do not need to query the ksqlDB state table to store data from the data store. ksqlDB does not manage schemas automatically.

NoSQL

NoSQL uses a document that is more of a relational model, although they offer many of the same capabilities as traditional databases. Traditional databases store their data in tabular relationships, which means that a NoSQL database does not have a fixed table structure as found in relational databases, but is stored in a variety of ways, such as key value pairs or JSON objects. Users often find NoSQL databases to store very wide columns and sparsely populated data.

Although NoSQL databases are designed to remain light and efficient in scale, normalization can increase the capacity of traditional relational RDBMS to expand to terabytes. Therefore, SQL databases are not designed to overcome the limitations of the Relational Databases found in other databases.

NoSQL Benefits

Handle Large Volumes of Data

SQL databases are usually implemented with a scale – an architecture based on performance improvement, rather than the traditional database-as-a-service approach.

Store different structures of data

If you use a relational database, you need to design a data model and then load and transform that data into the database. Structured tables have a predefined schema, and the data is then transformed and stored in a structured table.

Conclusion

While cross-industry data streaming use cases exist, the ability to integrate, analyze, and predict data in real-time opens up new use cases for companies across a wide range of industries. In this article, we looked at bringing real-time data analysis to life with the help of some of the most popular data analysis tools available today.

In short, any industry that deals with big data can benefit from continuous real-time data. Companies can store past data and stacks of data and gain valuable insights from moving data.

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SQLake is Upsolver’s newest offering. It lets you build and run reliable data pipelines on streaming and batch data via an all-SQL experience. Try it for free. No credit card required.