[atwebb]

Real-time generally means near-real-time and even then I liken it to availability.

If asked people would say "I need to always be up" until they see the costs associated with it, then being out for a few hours a year tends to be ok.

[datadrivenangel]

This is a great way looking at it. The cost starts going up rapidly from daily and approaches infinity as you get to ultra-low latency realtime analytics.

There is a minimum cost though (systems, engineers, etc), so for medium data there's often very little marginal cost up until you start getting to hourly refreshes. This is not true for larger datasets though.