Fabric RTI 101: Latency vs Freshness Tradeoffs

When people hear the phrase real-time, their minds often jump straight to sub-second response. They imagine dashboards updating instantly or transactions being analyzed faster than the blink of an eye. But in reality, not every scenario demands that level of speed — and chasing sub-second performance everywhere can actually be counterproductive.

It’s helpful to think about real-time in classes of latency. At the extreme, you have sub-second responses — critical for areas like algorithmic trading, where even a few milliseconds can cost millions. Then there are scenarios where a response in a few seconds is perfectly adequate — for example, fraud detection. If you can flag a suspicious credit card transaction within two or three seconds, that’s usually enough to stop the transaction before it clears. And then there are other cases where even minutes are fine. Think about a customer experience dashboard in a call center — if the screen refreshes every minute or two, that still feels live enough to be useful.

The Trade-Off

The trade-off here is cost and complexity.

The lower the latency you require, the more compute resources you’ll burn, the more complex your architecture becomes, and the more specialized engineering you’ll need. Sub-second systems are not only expensive to run but also expensive to design, test, and maintain. On the other hand, if your business problem can tolerate a few seconds or minutes, you can build a simpler and far more cost-effective solution.

Don’t pursue the lowest possible latency just because the technology can do it. Instead, match the latency to the business need.

Ask yourself: what’s the real consequence of being a second late? Or a minute late? If it’s negligible, then it’s smarter to design for a slightly higher latency and save on complexity and cost.

In other words, treat latency as a business decision, not just a technical one. The right level of freshness depends entirely on the use case — not on what looks impressive in a demo.

Learn more about Fabric RTI

If you really want to learn about RTI right now, we have an online on-demand course that you can enrol in, right now. You’ll find it at Mastering Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

2026-01-13