Fabric RTI 101: Hopping

A hopping window is a flexible windowing strategy that combines elements of both tumbling and sliding. Like tumbling, hopping windows have a fixed length — for example, 10 minutes. But unlike tumbling, they are allowed to overlap, because they advance by a smaller step size than their length.

For example, let’s say we configure a 10-minute window that hops forward every 5 minutes. That means between 12:00 and 12:10, you get one window, and between 12:05 and 12:15, you get another. Each window is 10 minutes long, but because they’re starting 5 minutes apart, they overlap. This means that every event can contribute to more than one window.

Why is this useful? It’s about balancing responsiveness with completeness. Tumbling windows only give you results after the full period has passed, which might feel too slow for some scenarios. Sliding windows give you very frequent results, but they can be expensive to compute because there’s so much overlap. Hopping windows strike a middle ground — they provide regular updates at hop intervals, while still including enough history to capture the full picture.

This approach is common in scenarios like real-time dashboards, where you want to see metrics that update frequently but still represent a larger span of data. For example, you might use a hopping window to calculate average CPU usage over 10 minutes, updated every 5 minutes. That way, you’re never more than a few minutes behind, but you still get stable results based on a meaningful chunk of data.

One trade-off to remember is that because events may belong to multiple windows, hopping windows do involve some duplication of computation. But in exchange, they give you timely updates without the jaggedness of tumbling or the heavy load of sliding.

You can think of hopping windows as a compromise — they hop forward at regular steps, overlapping enough to smooth the view, but not as computationally intense as sliding windows.

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

2026-04-19