Event Stream Data: What is it and why should I care?

“Events, dear boy, events.”

—British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when asked by a reporter what would influence his government’s decisions the most.

For a long time, most business folks have thought of data in a very structured, rigid manner. This is especially true in large, mature organizations. Data was almost always stored in neat and orderly tables in relational databases. For reporting purposes, often data was sent via an ETL batch job to a data warehouse or datamart. In short, things tended to be very controlled and predictable.

To be sure, a great deal of key enterprise information still falls into this model. As I describe in Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data the advents of Big Data and its components (the Internet of Things [IoT], sensor-driven data, social media, etc.) have not obviated the importance of clean accurate information in ERP and CRM applications. Make no mistake, though: these days events drive a great deal of critical information.