RTE begins with data. All the data, created in and out of a corporation, should be delivered to their destination and processed at the same time with their creation. The delay or the distortion in the transfer and the processing of data will cause the business to be delayed, and hinder the accurate decision making. Eventually, the corporation that cannot control the data will fall behind in the competition.
A lot of market research organizations expect that the importance of daily data analysis will be decreased, and the demand for real-time processing be rapidly increased, so in near future, real-time data processing will be the requirements for the overall business activities.
From this fact, we can define one of the first requirements of becoming RTE, the preposition that “the data should be transferred and processed in real time.”
Also, ubiquitous computing environment is fundamentally changing properties and a paradigm of data. If the processing method remains in the old condition even though the contents and the frame has changed, the endeavors for the innovation will not be able to do what they can, and the corporations will fall into a new problem. Therefore, we can define the second preposition, “the data processing method that suits the paradigm shift is required.”

Then, how are the properties and the paradigm of data changing in the ubiquitous computing environment? First, we can count the change of the subject that generates and consumes the data.
From our old standard, the subject that generates and consumes the data is a human being. However, everything on the earth - cell phones, household appliances, electricity poles, bridges over sea, animals, plants, even walls, air, and water ? creates, distributes, and consumes the data. And they communicate with each other by creating mutually organic relationship. Professionals expect that more than a trillion systems and objects will communicate with each other in the future.
The communication between human beings, objects, and environmental surroundings is the biggest paradigm shift caused by ubiquitous computing, and this also means that everything on the earth will have intellectual powers. When a passenger passes through detection gate in an airport, his identity will be checked automatically, and the immigration registration will be completed at the same time. When a customer picks up a product and put it in the shopping bag, much information, including date of manufacture, manufacturer, and ingredients, will be sent to the customer. If you think of a scene in a Sci-Fi movie, you can see the world ubiquitous computing environment will create.
Also, the data in the ubiquitous computing environment are created and transferred continuously, and they keep changing over time.

The first thing to expect from such change is the explosive increase of the amount of data in a corporation.
According to the latest report from IDC, the amount of digital information, generated and replicated in Korea in 2010, will be as many as 15,700PB, 7 times more compared to the year 2006. The increase rate of data, which has been twice in 11 months, will be twice in 11 hours, from 2010. Ubiquitous computing is one of the reasons of such enormous increase rate.
Eventually, ubiquitous technology expands the distributed environment, changes data property, and increases complexity and heterogeneity. Also, more powerful computing capabilities will be required. If you do not establish the solutions for the new paradigm, the increase of the investment and management expenses is obvious.

Among the various changes in ubiquitous computing environment, we need to pay special attention to ‘continuity’ property of data.
Continuously created data, or data stream has dynamic property. It is called Active Data, in the sense that it is not static, but alive and changing in real time, and that it is breathing like a form of life.
There are countless data that have the property of the stream in current business and computing environment.
  ▲ The data poured out by countless sensors in USN (Ubiquitous Sensor Network) environment,
  ▲ Hundreds of thousands / millions of data generated in the manufacturing equipments of industry such as semiconductors and cars,
  ▲ Enormous traffic that should be processed by system control solutions, such as application/system performance management - above data are the typical examples of stream data. The delay in the processing of such data will cause significant damage to productivity, efficiency and reliability of the corporation.

Therefore, to establish plans to process data stream is to find a solution to adapt to the new paradigm, ubiquitous. Then, the corporation can achieve the goal of being RTE.
Of course, it is not impossible to process data stream with existing method, DBMS. However, the input unit of Tuple for data stream is not a complete table, but continuous data stream, so it is not efficient in terms of space and time, to store the entire input stream, and to process at once, just like DBMS.
Also, the structure that the queries should be regularly made when requested by the user or the application, only places more load on the system while processing data stream. Real-time response is also not ensured.
Therefore, data should be processed actively when data is generated. This means that the data should be able to determine which query it should process by itself. The query method should not be a one time query, but be continuous query. Also, the data should arrive at its target in real time, without any limitation to physical equipments or location. With such properties, passive data processing method can be finally changed into active data processing, and realize true RTE.