Real-time applications are becoming the norm today. But building a model that works properly requires real-time data from the source, in-flight stream processing, and low latency serving of its analytics. With this practical book, data engineers, data architects, and data analysts will learn how to use streaming databases to build real-time solutions. Authors Hubert Dulay and Ralph M. Debusmann take you through streaming database fundamentals, including how these databases reduce infrastructure for real-time solutions. You'll learn the difference between streaming databases, stream processing, and real-time online analytical processing (OLAP) databases. And you'll discover when to use push queries versus pull queries, and how to serve synchronous and asynchronous data emanating from streaming databases. So what is a streaming database? Database systems have many different flavors, from traditional relational databases to XML, graph, object, vector, and NoSQL databases. Many of these are well known and have been established for many decades. Streaming, or stream processing, is much less established, although it has seen a steep adoption rate in the industry over the past decade or so, led by the rise of Apache Kafka as the de facto streaming platform. Whether you’re a seasoned database engineer or a novice developer, this book guides you to unlocking the full potential of streaming databases and embracing the future of data processing.