A practical guide to real-time analytics in 2026

Databricks explains that real-time analytics should run as a feature of the lakehouse rather than requiring a separate serving engine such as Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, or ClickHouse.

The guide defines real-time analytics across three dimensions: freshness, latency, and concurrency. It also contrasts real-time workloads, which need insights in milliseconds to seconds, with batch analytics, which can wait minutes to hours.