By Craig S. Mullins

Have you heard about stream computing? Basically, it involves the ingestion of data - structured or unstructured - from arbitrary sources and the processing of it without necessarily persisting it. Any digitized data is fair game for stream computing. As the data streams it is analyzed and processed in a problem-specific manner. The "sweet spot" applications for stream computing are situations in which devices produce large amounts of instrumentation data on a regular basis. The data is difficult for humans to interpret easily and is likely to be too voluminous to be stored in a database somewhere. Examples of types of data that are well-suited for stream computing include healthcare, weather, telephony, stock trades, and so on ... full article.

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