Where the nightly rollup came from
The nightly rollup is a compute artifact. Twenty years ago, running an aggregation across a large table was expensive enough that most companies ran it once, at night, when the servers were quiet. This is no longer true, but the pattern survived.
The reason it survived is not that businesses run nightly. It's that nobody rebuilt the reporting layer once the underlying constraint disappeared.
“Nightly rollups tell you what happened. Continuous analytics tells you while it's still happening.”
What continuous catches earlier
STALLA pipeline stage slowing before the quarterly total moves
SHIFTA channel changing shape mid-campaign
EXPANSIONA customer's usage jumping this week, not last quarter
REGRESSIONA conversion narrowing before it affects revenue
