As competitive pressures increase, many organiza­tions want to leverage higher volumes of diverse data for analytics and new appli­cations, including real-time and streaming data.

Streaming data refers to data that is gener­ated continuously in a stream, typically at high volume, either at regular or irregular intervals. Working with streaming data may involve capturing multiple streams for later analysis or processing, or analyzing one or more streams in real time—for example, to immediately capture data that deviates from the norm.