Here Are the Pros and Cons for Batch and Stream Processing
By: Lisa Logan
Tags: Software Development, Tech, Data, Big Data

As data gains more and more value in today’s digital marketplace, it important to understand how your business can get on the fast-track for reliable information gathering and storing. Though businesses can agree that cloud-based storage is the key to ensuring their data management is secure, trusted and easily accessible, there’s still a debate on how to get data processed faster, with the utmost amount of security — that being batch vs streaming. Each approach has its pros and cons, but your choice of batch or streaming all comes down to your business needs. Let’s dive deep into the debate to see exactly which use cases require the use of batch vs. streaming processing.

What is Batch vs Streaming Processing?

There are two worlds in the cosmos of big data: batch and stream processing. Processing data in batches can tell you what happened at your organization sometime last week, month or last year. It gives you a historical context of your data and allows you to make decisions or improvements for efficiency purposes. Batch processing has been the common approach until companies discovered the ability to stream data in real-time. Stream-processing on the contrary is all about the “now”. It is about obtaining insight and business value by extracting analytics as soon as it comes into the enterprise. Let’s dive in deeper into the pros and cons of each type of data processing to discover what it truly right for you.

What are the principles of Agile?

Agile has been one of the most popular development frameworks since its inception in 1996. Many different frameworks have been spun off of agile, and competitors have appeared. We’ll go through some of these frameworks and competitors and identify places you can potentially adopt a hybrid approach. Should you adopt lean agile? Is a visualization tool like Kanban the key to your projects success?

Batch Processing

Within the batch processing model, data is collected over time and loaded into an analytics system to send for processing. It is often used when dealing with large amounts of data and when you don’t need real-time analytics results. Sometimes you might need to process large volumes of data for detailed insights, or business strategies, which is where cloud-based technologies come in handy. Despite the advances in technology that allow us to move ever-growing amounts of data faster, there is still a disconnect between the flood of data we are encountering and our ability to process it. Integrating mainframe data into a real-time analytics environment takes a lot of time, which makes it unfeasible to turn it into streaming data in most cases. A survey recently conducted by Forbes with Dimensional Research demonstrates that almost 75% of corporate IT leaders at companies with more than 1,000 employees still primarily use batch data processing.

Stream Processing

The truth of the matter is that, as you’re reading this article, the data your organization has gained this moment has the most significant value right now. That’s because its usefulness steadily decreases while data sits in storage. Stream processing is the answer for you if you want analytics results in real time — you feed data into analytics tools as soon as it is generated and get immediate analytics results using platforms like Spark Streaming. Stream processing is useful for tasks like fraud detection in product transactions, where you can detect fraud in real time and stop fraudulent transactions before they are even completed.

Conclusion

In this article we’ve scratched the surface of the worlds of both technologies. By exploring the advantages of batch and stream processing, you can explore new business strategies — the exciting part about the world of data! Although streaming is best used for time-saving purposes, and batch is for storing large amounts of data — it all comes down to your use case. What is best for your business objectives? Sometimes they are also best when used in conjunction. You can adopt both types of streaming if you think that is best for handling your business problems. At the end of the day, you will want to understand both work-flows for added insight.

originally posted on fivestar*