It’s this time of year again, when crystal balls meet data. Here’s what’s kept the data world busy in 2017, and will most likely continue to do so in 2018.

Let’s begin by getting the obvious out of the way: there’s no way we could accurately predict what is going to happen, and you should be very skeptical when people claim otherwise. Even when using data and advanced analysis techniques, there will always be bias and imperfection in the analyses.

We admit to having a subjective point of view, but one that is informed by monitoring the data industry and its news for the past year, and we try to leverage this to highlight what are the most import trends going forward. Without further ado, here are the top five things we have noted in 2017, and will be keeping an eye on in 2018.

In the data world, streaming is not all about Netflix — although Netflix also does it. Confused? Let’s set the record straight. Streaming refers to streams of data processed in real time. The real time part is not all that new — operational databases have been doing that for years.

What is new however is the fact that now data is not just pushed to some back end for storage to power the operation of applications, but also analyzed on the fly. The endless streams of data generated by applications lends its name to this paradigm, but also brings some hard to deal with requirements to the table.

Read the full article on ZDNet