[10000truths]

Streams are conceptually infinite, yes, but many streaming use cases are dealing with a finite amount of data that's larger than memory but fits on disk. In those cases, you can typically get away with materializing your inputs to a temporary file in order to implement joins, sorts, percentile aggregations, etc.

[psfried]

Yes, and this is an important point! This is the reason for our current approach for sqlite derivations. You can absolutely just store all the data in the sqlite database, as long as it actually fits. And there's cases where people actually do this on our platform, though I don't think we have an example in our docs.

A lot of people just learning about streaming systems don't come in with useful intuitions about when they can and can't use that approach, or even that it's an option. We're hoping to build up to some documentation that can help new people learn what their options are, and when to use each one.