The landscape of stream processing and database development is experiencing significant evolution, with developers and companies seeking solutions that bridge the gap between traditional batch processing and real-time data needs. While Apache DataFusion offers promising capabilities as a database development toolkit, the community discussion reveals deeper challenges and opportunities in the streaming data processing space.
The Streaming Challenge
While DataFusion excels at handling static data processing, implementing streaming capabilities presents a distinct set of challenges. Community discussions highlight that stream processing requires specialized infrastructure components beyond what traditional SQL engines offer. The infrastructure complexity, reliability of streaming consumption, and memory management emerge as critical pain points that current solutions struggle to address comprehensively.
Market Gap in Embedded Solutions
A significant void exists in the market for embedded streaming solutions. Current offerings predominantly follow a cloud-based, VC-backed model, leaving developers who need embedded streaming capabilities with limited options. As one community member notes:
It's much easier to just do say kafka and a long running python script and write out the transformations by hand, than it is to use anything on the market right now. None of the current streaming processors want to be embedded as far as I can tell, that's not where the money is.
Emerging Solutions and Innovations
Several projects are attempting to address these challenges. Arroyo has taken an innovative approach by utilizing components of DataFusion's SQL frontend and expression engine while implementing their own dataflow and operators. Materialize has recently made strides in addressing memory usage issues and improving disk-based data management. Meanwhile, ClickHouse continues to evolve its materialized view capabilities for streaming scenarios.
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| This image represents the ongoing innovations in database technologies and the journey of building better streaming solutions |
The Path Forward
The community consensus suggests that while the basic streaming SQL primitives (such as tumble, hop, or session windows) are well-established, the real challenge lies in creating infrastructure that can reliably handle real-world use cases. The ideal solution would combine the accessibility of traditional SQL with robust streaming capabilities, all while maintaining developer-friendly interfaces and reasonable infrastructure complexity.
The evolution of this space continues, with various approaches being explored by different projects. However, the holy grail of an embedded, developer-friendly streaming solution that matches the ease of use of traditional databases remains elusive, presenting an opportunity for innovation in the coming years.
Source Citations: Building Databases over a Weekend