Streaming for Dummies

Despite over thirty years of continuing development and a rising prominence in the public eye, today’s databases continue to be outpaced by the human appetite for new ways to process information. Although databases continue to serve as a reliable platform for transaction-based operations, traditional relational database management systems have come up short against a new class of data management problems. This paper provides an overview of these problems, examines why traditional relational systems are inadequate to deal with them, and identifies a new class of data processing currently known as Data Stream Management Systems (DSMS) designed to handle them. We will provide an overview of the current status of the field, as well as focus on some prototypical systems.