Streaming Analytics with IBM Streams: Analyze More, Act Faster, and Get Continuous Insights

7The Streams Ecosystem

A distributed real-time analytics platform must integrate with the overall big data environment. It must fit seamlessly within the big data architecture and the enterprise legacy systems. This chapter describes how Streams interfaces with many of these systems. The subjects covered include:

• Adapters provided with Streams

• Adapters available as open-source

• IBM product interfaces

• Partner product interfaces

• Streams extensibility

The Streams ecosystem is constantly changing. Even if this chapter covers a wide range of products, this should not be considered an exhaustive list.

Streams Provided Adapters

As we’ve seen in Chapter 4, Streams comes with a number of toolkits. Several of these toolkits include adapters used to communicate with the outside world. This section explores several of the toolkits.

The Standard Toolkit adapters

Operators from the Standard toolkit are available by default to all projects. The Standard toolkit provides the following adapters used to communicate with the outside world:

• DirectoryScan, FileSource, and FileSink: The names of these operators are enough to understand what they do. The FileSource adapter also has the ability to take its input from a source like the DirectoryScan that then provides the name of the next file to read. Each operator comes with a set of parameters that should give all the flexibility required in reading and writing files. The FileSource and DirectoryScan operators also come with custom output ...