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April 24, 2008Data - streaming or at rest
I was having an interesting discussion over lunch with a CTO/Professor who articles that all data is streaming data and I posted it to my twitter account as a question. Brenda took the trouble to reply, saying:
I say no. Most data is "at rest". Streaming typically corresponds to frequent state changes of the thing the data represents and of course, someone/thing cares to know about the data (thing) as it looks right nowI found Brenda's reply interesting as it was, more or less, the position I took before the conversation I had over lunch. The counter argument is that all data starts off as streaming data - it only becomes data at rest when we decide to store it. For the data whose change initiates something we can and should think of it as streaming data. Data we might reference as part of deciding how to act on that data may well be data at rest - last month's numbers for instance. So, for any given decision, only some data is "streaming" and the rest is at rest. However I think the basic point, that all data begins as streaming data, is an interesting one.
You can find my twitter posts at twitter.com/jamet123 and Brenda's at twitter.com/bmichelson
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Here’s another way to look at it. Data as it is represented in memory or storage is comprised of static bits at rest. (Rest, that is, if you consider being dynamically pulsed with current or spinning at 8000 RPM very restful.) But when data is initially created, whether by another system or application or physical sensor, etc., or when data is processed in some way (i.e. filtered, aggregated, stored, queried, etc.), it becomes a data stream in that it must typically pass through a microprocessor, or set of processors, in a sequential fashion, like water under a processing bridge. So the streaming/rest question really seems to hinge on whether you’re talking about the physical representation of data or data being created or processed in some way. The latter invariably seems to involve streaming data.
Posted by: Jan Liband at April 28, 2008 03:32 PM
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