StreamBase Systems, a leading provider of complex event processing technology, has teamed with researchers from Oracle Corporation, the world's largest enterprise software company, 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.
Mark Palmer, President and COO stated "StreamBase is delighted to partner with leading scientists from Oracle to further CEP standards. As a member of several industry groups we firmly believe in working towards common standards as the market for CEP matures. StreamBase's StreamSQL is based on the world standard database language, SQL."
"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.
"Converging on language standards is good for the entire event processing infrastructure, from end-users to vendors to the large ecosystem of streaming data providers and application partners. Standardization makes programming more portable and allows greater development of third-party applications," said StreamBase co-founder and Chief Architect, Richard Tibbetts, who is co-presenting the paper at the conference. "Our goal is to focus on the expanding business problems CEP solves, and compete on the merits of the CEP platform, rather than differences in programming language."
Oracle and StreamBase researchers proposed that the best solution for event-based and set-based language approaches to converge would be to cleanly integrate the two standards with unifying extensions. For example, a proposed language operator called SPREAD would allow data sets to be aggregated with ordering imposed. Such a technique would facilitate a natural fusion of past and real-time event data.