Streaming data is a paradigm where data is processed in real-time as it's created, allowing for fast decision-making and instant feedback to customers or users. This approach has several benefits, including reducing memory utilization, reducing spaghetti architecture, and enabling real-time analytics and business insights. Streaming data can be applied to various use cases such as financial trading, business analytics, security systems, retail and inventory management, and more. It requires a different mindset than traditional batch processing and involves event sources, ingestion systems, stream processing systems, and data sinks. Streaming databases like SingleStoreDB are designed to handle streaming data and provide both operational and analytical workloads with high performance and low latency.