We discussed how unified data access is empowered by Spark. It lets you process data in a myriad of ways to build end-to-end continuous applications by enabling various analytic workloads, such as ETL processing, ad hoc queries, online machine learning modeling, or to generate necessary reports... all of this in a unified way by letting you work on both static as well as streaming data using a high-level, SQL-like API. In this way, Structured Streaming has substantially simplified the development and maintenance of real-time, continuous applications.