Batch-Processing Technologies

Consider, for instance, the case of credit card processing. First and most obviously, it will involve the processing of the credit card transaction in real time, as the buyer and the seller will need to know as quickly as possible whether the transaction was approved. This is an example of stream processing. On the other hand, if the credit card company sends a statement at the end of the month with all the transactions made by the cardholder, that is an example of batch processing.

So, batch processing is characterized by the larger quantity of data processed (in the example, a month’s worth of transactions as opposed to a single transaction) and at longer intervals of time (in the example, every month as opposed to as soon as possible) than is customary in stream processing. Another example can be offered by the data ingestions and transformations required as part of an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) or Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) process...