A system, method and computer program product for adaptive incremental checkpointing an operator state in a streaming application. The system and method enable reduced costs of checkpointing an operator state in a streaming application, by i) logging updates to operator state and checkpointing operator state in either base (full state) or delta (logged updates) form, ii) dynamically and adaptively adjusting checkpointing options, and iii) maintaining dependencies between checkpoints to allow automatic restoration and checkpoint recycling.