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.
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch 