Nov 2, 2008

Event Stream Processing

I have just stumbled upon this new approach to event-based design. A wikipedia example says it all in 7 lines. The idea is to use an SQL-like language to create filters (capable of event correlation, typically limited to a certain period) and run a continuous stream of events through them. There is even an open source implementation. At first glance most currently available products are used in algorithmic trading (whatever was left of it after the crisis :) ).

To me this concept seems to be a kind of rule engine and so potentially there are multiple domains where it might be applied. On the other hand it makes me wonder whether it is indeed a re-packaged rule engine and in such a case what is so different about it.

Performance is the name of the game because ESP is positioned as a soft real-time technology. It must be pretty interesting to read how they manage to achieve their declared ability to process a huge number of events per second on commodity hardware.

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