Spark Structured Streaming: A Comprehensive Guide

Many people think of streaming as some very low-latency continuous real-time events like Twitter feeds or IoT devices; while that was the original use case, streaming has evolved over the years to allow integration with other non-real-time tables. In this chapter, we will first go back in time to visit Spark Streaming; then we will look at the latest Databricks Structured Streaming engine and how to use Delta Live Tables to process streaming. Apache Spark offers two popular streaming processing engines: Spark Streaming and Structured Streaming. While both engines are designed for real-time data processing, they have distinct architectures, advantages, and use cases.