Manipulating "data in flight" versus "data at rest" is the next frontier in the analytics discipline. The most recent exuberance from the IT industry centers on Big Data parallel processing, NoSQL technologies, and the in-memory capability for business intelligence queries. These trends enable more agility for the practitioner and provide enterprises a greater ability to react to information with lower latency than ever before. These factors contribute to enhancing the value that companies can extract from data assets. Much of the current focus lies with data at rest, in existing relational and NoSQL databases, but these systems don't have the correct physics to react to data in flight. Data in flight refers to real-time data streams and requires a unique toolset, skill set, and mindset to implement successful systems. In this article, we'll examine real-time data streams in practice.