Micro-Batch: The Middle Ground

Concepts covered: paMicroBatchVsTrue

Most production pipelines that look like streaming are not pure streaming. They are micro-batch: very small batches, often every few seconds or every minute, processed by an engine that exposes a streaming API on top. Spark Structured Streaming is the largest example. Flink can run in batch or streaming mode with a tunable trigger interval. The pattern exists because pure streaming is expensive and pure batch cannot meet sub-15-minute freshness. Micro-batch sits in the middle: latency low enough to feel real-time, throughput high enough to amortize per-batch overhead, complexity simpler than full streaming. How Micro-Batch Works The Spark Structured Streaming Pattern The trigger argument is the key knob. Setting processingTime to one minute tells Spark to process whatever has accumulated i

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