Yes, I think "streaming data" and "big data" really are different things, and I like your term "Fast Data". From a lower-level perspective they involve very dif

Yes, I think "streaming data" and "big data" really are different things, and I like your term "Fast Data". From a lower-level perspective they involve very different challenges. If you need to store the data (Twitter-like data) then storage becomes your primary concern. Analysis can be done later and in less-than-real time. But if your data are coming in so fast that keeping up is the problem, then storage isn't even a consideration (you generally just don't) and analysis becomes the challenging part, you need to aggregate do be able to update your metrics on the fly. So they really aren't even overlapping problems outside of the fact that they both deal with lots of data.