In-Line vs. Observations

I am back in business after spilling water on my laptop (total-loss)... Fortunately, the hard-disk was not damaged, and I after getting the excellent IBM support to work in holiday, I have (another) laptop, not recommended to spill - water, coffee or anything else on computers...

Anyway, last post I have discussed RTE vs. BAM, and succeeded to confuse some people, so it needs some clarification. First - as said before, event processing is a collection of functions, that derive, detect pattern, enrich, transform, and some other functions that take events as input, processes the events, and produces (possibly other) events as output.

The distinction is - where, relative to running transactions, the event processing is done. In-Line event processing means that the event processing is done inside a transaction, not observing the transaction from the outside. In this case, the event creation may be part of the transaction (e.g. an application emits event, but the result actions belong to the same transaction), or a starting-point for a transaction. To give a concrete example (repeating the same example from the previous post) - some application emits an event saying "cancel order" (this by itself may or may not be a result of event processing function), this should be atomic with the execution of the cancellation, if cancellation is not possible, then some compensation is needed in the producer application. Likewise, an event can start a transaction that spans all its descendants and actions, if an action in the consumer cannot execute, or there is some validation issue, the entire thread of the "event processing network" should abort/compensate, this is in contrast to "observation mode" -- observe if there is some anomaly, and if there is - notify somebody. In the In-Line case, the transaction can change its course due to event processing, in the observation case - the impact is indirect. Of course, in some cases we have combinations of all. There are two issues that should be discussed: what is the relationship between "observation" mode of event processing to what the market knows as BAM ? another question --- what is the semantic meaning of rollback or compensation when talking about events? more discussion on each of these issues - later. Happy New Year.