The latest issue of CACM has an article entitled “Data In Flight” by Julian Hyde (chief architect of SQLstream). The article is a survey of streaming SQL technology and how it may apply to ever increasing datastreams.
I will also highlight two small items out of the article. The first is an assertion that web application authors are generalists:
The technologies for powering Web applications must be fairly straightforward for two reasons: first, because it must be possible to evolve a Web application rapidly and then to deploy it at scale with a minimum of hassle; second, because the people writing Web applications are generalists and are not prepared to learn the kind of complex, hard-to-tune technologies used by systems programmers.
And second, about 2/3 of the way through the article he finally makes the logical connection to CEP, and throws in an aside about an ongoing religious war. Is this the CEP/Rete debate that I am aware of, or some other debate?
CEP has been used within the industry as a blanket term to describe the entire field of streaming query systems. This is regrettable because it has resulted in a religious war between SQL-based and non-SQL-based vendors and, in overly focusing on financial services applications, has caused other application areas to be neglected.
Karl
My take on this – which I have tried to express in blogs in the past- is that these wars are all caused by the confusion introduced by how CEP vendors position their offering.
Each vendor appplies its marketing spin on the discussion: http://tibcoblogs.com/cep/2009/08/21/cep-versus-esp-an-essay-or-maybe-a-rant/
Of course, in that view CEP is the superset of everything – including production rules. I reminds me of the assertion made at ORF that BPM is a specialization of CEP…
I have listened to presentations which describe whole systems – from fraud management to originations management – as “CEP instantiations”. That’s an incredibly confusing generalization.
As you know, there are other positions which attempt to make a very clear and dogmatic distinction between event processing, business processes and busines rules. See: http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2008/11/an-attempt-at-demystifying-cep-bpm-and-brms.html – which is the perspective I support. I find it clear, each technology / approach has a clear objective, and where they meet and how they interact is clear.
Our decision management industry will fare much better once we clarify all these things.
Carlos
http://techondec.wordpress.com
http://architectguy.blogspot.com/
P.S. also note that there is confusion also introduced by talking about SQL-based CEP approaches. They are not SQL-based, they just happen to use a SQL-like syntax for the continuous query capabilities.
http://www.coral8.com/blogs/blog-entry/cep-and-sql-top-five-myths
Another souce of confusion…