drinking from a firehose

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

to receive information at an overwhelming, unmanageable rate; in data engineering, describes systems or people trying to consume enormous data streams without adequate infrastructure or capacity; commonly used to describe the challenge of processing real-time event streams or the experience of onboarding onto a data-rich organization

History and origin

English — from the literal image of trying to drink water from a pressurized firefighting hose; the force and volume would be impossible to manage. Popularized in the internet and big data era.

Examples

• The Kafka consumer was drinking from a firehose — ingesting 500,000 events per second at peak load.
• Joining this company is like drinking from a firehose — there are petabytes of data and no documentation.