Java 8 Stream vs Collection Storage

Question

I have been reading up on Java 8 Streams and the way data is streamed from a data source, rather than have the entire collection to extract data from.

This quote in par

Answer 1

Previous answer are mostly correct. Yet still a much more intuitive response follows (for Google passengers landing here):

Think of streams as UNIX pipelines of text: cat input.file | sed ... | grep ... > output.file

In general those UNIX text utilities will consume an small quantity of RAM compared to the processed input data.

That's not always the case. Think of "sort". This algorithm will need to keep intermediate stuff in memory. That same is true for streams. Sometimes temporal data will be needed. Most of the times it will not.

As an extra simile, to some extend "cloud-serverless APIs" follows this same UNIX pipelines o Java stream design. They do not exist in memory until the have some input data to process. The cloud OS will launch them and inject the input data. The output is sent gradually somewhere else, so the cloud-serverless-API does not consume many resources (most of the times).

Not absolute "trues" in this case.