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Do I need real-time data or is daily refresh enough?
Daily refresh is enough for most management reporting. Real-time data is worth the extra cost and complexity only when decisions must be made within minutes, such as fraud checks, live operations or inventory alerts. Match the refresh rate to how quickly someone can actually act.
Ask what would change if the data were fresher. If a manager reviews numbers each morning, hourly updates add cost without value.
Typical options:
- Daily: most financial and sales reporting
- Hourly: operational monitoring
- Near real time: live logistics or monitoring
Higher frequency means more infrastructure, more failure points and sometimes higher cloud query bills. A useful test is to ask who would act on the data within the hour and what exactly they would do.
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