Using different sources with continous streams

Streams of data can come from a variety of sources. Structured Streaming provides support from extracting data from sources such as Delta tables, publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems such as Azure Event Hubs, and more. We will review some of these sources in the next sections to learn how we can connect these streams of data into our jobs running in Azure Databricks.

Using a Delta table as a stream source

As mentioned in the previous chapter, you can use Structured Streaming with Delta Lake using the readStream and writeStream Spark methods, with a particular focus on overcoming issues related to handling and processing small files, managing batch jobs, and detecting new files efficiently.

When a Delta table is used as a data stream source, all the queries done on that table will process the information on that table as well as any data that has arrived since the stream started.

In the next example, we will load both the path...