I've been trying to understand why this is easy for some customers and hard for others, and I've recently observed a pattern I want to share. I'm sure it is controversial and does not explain the whole story, but still. Here it goes:
Those people who find it hard to come up with specific use cases think about The Event Cloud. Those who find it easy to do think in term of event streams.
Now, if you were following the recent "CEP vs. ESP" wars, you may be forgiven for thinking that the basic difference between clouds and streams is about ordering. Streams carry ordered events and clouds don't require ordering, or so the story goes. Well, we all know this is false. Coral8 Engine, as well as some other ESP/CEP engines can handle unordered streams. So ordering is a red herring.
The real difference between a cloud and a stream is much more significant. An event cloud is an abstract concept. In some sense, it does not really exist! An event cloud represents a collection of all the events flowing through an enterprise or a part of an enterprise. It may be useful to think about this collection from a theoretical standpoint, but in my experience, it does not help one come up with and understand use cases.
Streams, on the other hand, are much more real and useful. Each stream has a meaning and carries similar events. You can decompose your events into input streams, output streams, and intermediate streams. Each stream (at least in the Coral8 Engine) has a name (a URI) and is a publish/subscribe topic, so you may have multiple subscribes and publishers dynamically added. Also, each stream may have an access control list associated with it.
Once you think about a stream, you can think about the things you may want to do with it, such as filter events, maintain a window, aggregate events over a window, enrich the stream, join it with another stream, persist it to a database, and so on. Your use cases start practically defining themselves as soon as you decompose your problem into streams and operations on streams.
Hopefully this has convinced you to stop thinking about "The Cloud" and start thinking about multiple streams, at least for the purpose of defining use cases. As some folks know, I like finding non-CEP analogies for CEP topics. Here is one here: You'll never understand databases if you think that they just store "data". To understand databases, you've got to understand that they store tables. Similarly, to uncloud and streamline your thinking about CEP, start thinking streams.
Mark Tsimelzon, President & CTO, Coral8. ]]>
I've been trying to understand why this is easy for some customers and hard for others, and I've recently observed a pattern I want to share. I'm sure it is controversial and does not explain the whole story, but still. Here it goes:
Those people who find it hard to come up with specific use cases think about The Event Cloud. Those who find it easy to do think in term of event streams.
Now, if you were following the recent "CEP vs. ESP" wars, you may be forgiven for thinking that the basic difference between clouds and streams is about ordering. Streams carry ordered events and clouds don't require ordering, or so the story goes. Well, we all know this is false. Coral8 Engine, as well as some other ESP/CEP engines can handle unordered streams. So ordering is a red herring.
The real difference between a cloud and a stream is much more significant. An event cloud is an abstract concept. In some sense, it does not really exist! An event cloud represents a collection of all the events flowing through an enterprise or a part of an enterprise. It may be useful to think about this collection from a theoretical standpoint, but in my experience, it does not help one come up with and understand use cases.
Streams, on the other hand, are much more real and useful. Each stream has a meaning and carries similar events. You can decompose your events into input streams, output streams, and intermediate streams. Each stream (at least in the Coral8 Engine) has a name (a URI) and is a publish/subscribe topic, so you may have multiple subscribes and publishers dynamically added. Also, each stream may have an access control list associated with it.
Once you think about a stream, you can think about the things you may want to do with it, such as filter events, maintain a window, aggregate events over a window, enrich the stream, join it with another stream, persist it to a database, and so on. Your use cases start practically defining themselves as soon as you decompose your problem into streams and operations on streams.
Hopefully this has convinced you to stop thinking about "The Cloud" and start thinking about multiple streams, at least for the purpose of defining use cases. As some folks know, I like finding non-CEP analogies for CEP topics. Here is one here: You'll never understand databases if you think that they just store "data". To understand databases, you've got to understand that they store tables. Similarly, to uncloud and streamline your thinking about CEP, start thinking streams.
Mark Tsimelzon, President & CTO, Coral8. ]]>
Coral8 is one of 6 finalists in the “Database Engines and Data Tools” category. It is especially gratifying that the Coral8 Engine is a finalist because the category is much broader than Complex Event Processing, showing the high market interest in CEP and Coral8 within the general information management category.
The Jolt Award committee takes a deep, serious look at the products nominated for their Product Excellence Awards, even downloading and evaluating the products directly. The fact that Coral8 is a finalist shows the richness of the feature set and the completeness of the product for developers to build and deploy CEP applications.
It is also nice to note that Coral8 is the only CEP product that is a finalist for a Jolt Award.
Thank you to our customers who helped make our product so popular, and many thanks to our excellent product development team who has created such a fantastic product.
To read more about the Jolt Product Excellence Awards, please click here. To see the finalists across all categories, please click here.
Thanks for reading,
John Morrell
Coral8 is one of 6 finalists in the “Database Engines and Data Tools” category. It is especially gratifying that the Coral8 Engine is a finalist because the category is much broader than Complex Event Processing, showing the high market interest in CEP and Coral8 within the general information management category.
The Jolt Award committee takes a deep, serious look at the products nominated for their Product Excellence Awards, even downloading and evaluating the products directly. The fact that Coral8 is a finalist shows the richness of the feature set and the completeness of the product for developers to build and deploy CEP applications.
It is also nice to note that Coral8 is the only CEP product that is a finalist for a Jolt Award.
Thank you to our customers who helped make our product so popular, and many thanks to our excellent product development team who has created such a fantastic product.
To read more about the Jolt Product Excellence Awards, please click here. To see the finalists across all categories, please click here.
Thanks for reading,
John Morrell