Structured Streaming Data

This and the next few pages introduce concepts that provide the foundation for using StreamBase® and Spotfire LiveView components of Spotfire Streaming. If you are familiar with streaming data concepts, skip ahead to About StreamBase Studio.

StreamBase® is a development environment for creating, testing, and deploying programs that process and analyze structured, streaming data.

The word structured in this definition is important. You may be familiar with a streaming video service such as Netflix, or a streaming audio service. The data streamed by those services is in the form of video or audio files, which are unstructured by nature. However, if a streaming media service also provides metadata about each movie or song, chances are good that the metadata would be provided in structured form.

In a structured stream of data, a known or discoverable format repeats for each unit of data. A structured stream might be a sequence of name-value pairs, with a defined start and stop keyword at the beginning and end. The name-value pairs between each starts and stops keyword define one unit of data in that stream. Another stream might be a complex mix of hierarchical data that include list subunits with no fixed length, or where one unit of data can contain subunits of data with a different structure than the containing unit.

The 21st century has many examples of streams of structured data:

  • Brokerages report stock market transactions in structured streams to their peers, or markets such as NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange report them to the public.

  • Sports statistics are streamed while each game is played to news sites and to the public.

  • In the petroleum industry, each oil or gas well reports a stream of operating statistics to a central administration site.

  • Sensors stream reports of seismic activity at their location to a monitoring site.

  • Commercial websites stream purchase information from customers to back-end servers that process each order and return real-time results back to those customers.

  • Medical offices exchange information with insurance companies in a well-defined XML format.

A StreamBase® application can be developed to ingest each of these stream types and many others to analyze the incoming data in many ways. StreamBase applications then emit the same stream, or a modified stream, or any number of alternative streams as outputs.