Image: Speaker engaging with an online audience in a virtual event streaming setup – event streaming

Meta Description: Learn what streaming data is and how Streambased delivers real-time Kafka insights through SQL queries without ETL overhead.

Introduction to Streaming Data

You’ve probably heard the buzz around event streaming. But what is streaming data, really? In simple terms, it’s a continuous flow of events—think financial ticks, IoT sensor readings, or user clicks—moving through a system at high speed. Rather than batch-loading vast datasets overnight, streaming data delivers information the moment it arrives.

The result? You can react in real time. Detect fraud the second it happens. Update dashboards as traffic soars. Train AI models on fresh data. And all of this without waiting for slow, resource-hungry ETL pipelines.

Why Event Streaming Matters

Traditional, request-driven systems often can’t keep pace with today’s data deluge. Here’s why event streaming is a game changer:

Instant insights: Events are written to a log and consumed immediately.
Scalability: Handle spikes—stock trades, social feeds, IoT bursts—without breaking a sweat.
Resilience: Distributed platforms like Apache Kafka keep data safe and available, even under load.
Flexibility: Tap into any part of the stream at any time, for analytics or replay.

In short, event streaming powers modern apps that demand real-time responses and continuous analysis.

Challenges with Traditional ETL

Many organisations still rely on ETL processes to move data from Kafka into warehouses or databases. But ETL has drawbacks:

Lengthy delays.
Complex maintenance.
Data copies that grow stale.

Data engineers end up firefighting pipelines instead of exploring insights. And BI analysts wait hours—or days—for the latest figures.

Streambased’s Approach: Real-Time, No ETL

Enter Streambased. We let you query your Kafka streams as if they were a database table. No ETL. No extra storage layers. Just interactive SQL, live on event data.

Analytics Service for Kafka (A.S.K)

Our flagship offering, A.S.K, lets you:

Write standard SQL queries against Kafka topics.
Join streams with reference tables.
Get results in seconds, not hours.

Need a real-time sales dashboard? Done. Want to spot anomalies before they escalate? Easy. A.S.K transforms raw events into insights on the fly.

Iceberg Service for Kafka (I.S.K)

Working with tools like Snowflake or Databricks? I.S.K wraps your Kafka topics as Apache Iceberg tables. You get:

Seamless integration with BI platforms.
Zero data movement—always up to date.
Full schema evolution and time travel.

Basically, your data lake meets real-time streams—without rewriting your analytics code.

File System Storage Service for Kafka (S.S.K)

For rapid prototyping, S.S.K provides direct access to raw event logs. Export, sample, experiment—without impacting production throughput.

How Streambased Works

Under the hood, we tap into Kafka’s broker layer. Here’s a high-level view:

Connector Integration: Install a light agent on your Kafka cluster.
In-Memory Indexing: We index event keys and timestamps.
SQL Engine: Your queries go through a familiar SQL interface.
Results Delivery: Data streams back to your BI tool, notebook, or app.

No staging tables. No copy jobs. Just direct event streaming to your fingertips.

Use Cases Across Industries

Event streaming shines in any scenario that needs speed and scale. For example:

Financial Services: Real-time fraud detection.
Retail & eCommerce: Live inventory and pricing updates.
IoT & Manufacturing: Equipment health monitoring at the edge.
Marketing Analytics: Track campaigns and user behaviour instantly.
AI/ML Training: Feed models with the freshest data for accurate predictions.

Whatever your industry, real-time insights beat delayed reports every time.

Streambased vs. Traditional Platforms

Sure, other platforms offer event streaming. But Streambased stands out by:

Eliminating ETL complexity.
Querying data in place with SQL.
Integrating with BI tools without data movement.
Delivering sub-second latency at scale.

No more juggling pipelines. No more stale data. Just pure, live analytics.

Getting Started

Ready to unlock real-time Kafka insights? With Streambased:

Spin up A.S.K in minutes.
Connect to your BI tool of choice.
Run SQL queries on your event streams.

You’ll be up and running faster than you thought possible.

Your next move? Experience instant analytics on streaming data.
Visit https://streambased.io and start your free trial today!