by Bob Giffords, Independent Banking and Technology Analyst
and Mark Palmer, President and CEO, StreamBase Systems
The financial markets are accelerating: transaction volumes are up, latencies are down, complex cross asset trading up, revenue margins down. Recently markets have seen sudden spikes in volumes, and nervous volatility when the old rules of thumb broke down. Technology and global regulators have both changed those rules by increasing transparency, intensifying competition, and multiplying e-commerce relationships exponentially. Reforms such as Reg NMS in the US and MiFID in Europe have further increased the pressure, along with Basel II and the fair value accounting rules of the new International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The IFRS require, for example, firms to mark more of their assets and liabilities to market, while Basel II is much more explicit about risk adjusted capital reserves needed. Now, when markets move, traders need to catch them on-the-fly to cut their losses and go with the flow to ensure compliance with all the rules and customer mandates. The difference between just-in-time and just-too-late has just become bigger. …
New technologies like complex event processing (CEP), applied as a “white box” system for Real-Time Profit and Loss, have turned tracking real-time market movements into a practical proposition for ordinary firms. They can also play a key role in easing the transition to fragmented markets with their notorious dark pools and to the complex array of order, execution and liquidity management systems to support them. download the article
David Luckham and Roy Schulte
The official EPTS version of the Complex Event Processing Glossary Version 1.1 (July 2008) is published here and on the EPTS website. We thank all those who commented on previous versions. Those comments have helped and influenced the present version. We expect the glossary to be updated annually to reflect further comments and suggestions.
Please find the Complex Event Processing Glossary 2008 here for your comment.
by David Luckham
This second article follows on from part 1 on the history of complex event processing
CEP is the logical and obvious next step in the development of event processing that was described in our first article. The explosion of event traffic over the past twenty years has created a new set of demands. The IT layers of any major company (i.e., the company’s networks, middleware, enterprise service bus and websites) are humming with this traffic and people want to listen in. This created a demand to extract information from the event traffic. As we shall see, it is difficult to think of anything else that could have taken place in event processing at a particular point in time, around 2000, but CEP. The final question, yet to be answered of course, is about the future and what will eventually happen in event processing. Download pdf article.
by K. Mani Chandy and Michael Olson
California Institute of Technology
Event-driven applications that are constructed as compositions of Web applications offer significant benefits. Just as mashups compose Web services to create added value, so too can compositions of event-driven applications create added value.
This article first reviews concepts about event driven applications, sense & respond systems, and presents metrics for evaluating and comparing such systems; then a few examples of federated Web applications are presented; and finally two examples of Business Application Monitoring (BAM) dashboards dealing with politics and with startup companies are presented as illustrations.
Download the article - Federated Event Systems: The Event Web (768kB)
by David Luckham
The demand for processing higher level events, often called business events,has expanded rapidly over the past three or four years. In writing a short history of the development of CEP to meet the demands of these new markets, I have needed to refer often to a set of concepts that forms the core of CEP. For example, the question arises as to how much CEP is contained in the current CEP tools and applications out there in the marketplace. This article is a brief and incomplete overview of some of those concepts.
Also, we might mention that while most of these concepts are now well understood, there are many challenging research issues involved in developing efficient implementations to apply them to practical problems. pdf article.
StreamBase Systems has teamed with researchers from Oracle Corporation to research complex event processing (CEP) techniques and advance convergence on standard language implementation issues in an effort to continue to support the growth of CEP by applying standards that will allow enterprise developers to quickly understand, learn, and apply stream processing technologies.
“Towards A Streaming SQL Standard” is the result of the nearly two years of research, and will be presented at the Very Large Data Base Conference on August 28 in Auckland, New Zealand.
Representatives from StreamBase and Oracle will discuss integrating the two approaches into one common standard. One of the central observations in the paper was in its characterization of event-based, versus set-based event processing models. For example, StreamBase’s execution model is event-based, which is useful for deterministic event-by-event data processing, where the outcome of business logic is determined by the temporal order of the data. Oracle’s time-based model processes data in sets - an approach optimized for processing stored event data. A standards-based approach that embraces both models could result in an event processing approach that addresses both real-time and historical event processing in one language. Report
The fourth Event Processing Symposium will be held at the Stamford Hilton Hotel, Stamford Conn. Sept 17-18th. It is co-located with, and follows the Gartner Event Processing Summit. Wednesday, September 17th will be dedicated to presentations on the business and application side of event processing. Thursday, September 18th will be dedicated to the technology side and standards of event processing. On both days the meetings will take place between 8:30 AM and 7PM. Advanced-program.
by Brian Albright, RFID Update
Researchers at Radboud University in The Netherlands were able to monitor the body temperature of participants at the world’s largest marching event using RFID technology. Volunteer participants in the annual Four Days Marches of Nijmegen swallowed an RFID-based temperature sensor that measured their internal temperature and helped researchers identify potential health issues. …
Radboud University developed the temperature tracking solution to help marchers avoid overheating and dehydration. Using complex event processing (CEP) technology provided by Progress Software, researchers were able to monitor and record the ten volunteers’ temperatures via a signal transmitted every ten seconds from the RFID “pill” to a receiving device in the volunteer’s backpack. That data was then transmitted via Bluetooth to a GPS-enabled mobile phone (provided by Dutch telecommunications operator KPN) to the operations center at Radboud. report.
David Luckham and Roy Schulte
The latest version of the Complex Event Processing Glossary (May 2008) is published here. We thank all those who commented on previous versions. Those comments have helped and influenced the present version. We expect the glossary to be updated annually to reflect further comments and suggestions.
We are considering how best to incorporate additional terminology that might apply to specialized areas and topics in event processing, for example, SOA or EDA. Perhaps special terminology subsections might be an alternative to a simple “flat” extension? Suggestions on how to do this are welcome.
Please find the Complex Event Processing Glossary 2008 here for your comment.
by Matt Asay, C|Net News.com
On Monday, Orbitz Worldwide plans to announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite. Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday’s announcement will add significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry. …
ERMA and Graphite are “part of a Complex Event Processing system designed to monitor large distributed applications, analyze the data that is gathered and display that data in real-time graphs.”
Matt O’Keefe: “As the Internet continues to evolve with more and more interconnections, the complexity of the whole is increasing over time. This is why complex event processing is so suitable to this growing problem. It lets us take an enormous amount of data from our data center and boil it down to the essentials: One message that says a customer’s attempt failed because of “X,” and the source is “Y.” Our operations people shouldn’t have to learn each of the seven layers of our architecture. They should just receive an easy-to-understand message from the system that makes it easy to solve the problem.”
But why open source? What benefits does Orbitz derive from open-sourcing these projects? Why not keep ERMA and Graphite to themselves? Read the report.
