Jim, you have been in the thick of it. Enjoyed reading your post. I think the action is evolving in the direction of real-time integration of trickle feeds not just into in-memory pub-sub layers and in-memory analytics but also all the way down to Hadoop farms.

By now, XQuery which in the old ways was a contender (Ipedo tried to compete with Composite on that front) has fallen by the wayside. SQL remains. Schema evolution is the evergreen problem statement no matter which stack is being used.

I have seen some recent work in this area that I find appealing in terms of removing the binary choices between big data or fast data on the one hand and between fresh data and consistent data on the other.