Some footnotes to Luckham's "short history of CEP- part 3"

David Luckham, who took upon himself to survey the history of "complex event processing" has written a series of articles about the roots and developments the CEP area, while this is relatively young as discipline, it has roots in other disciplines, and people who worked separately from different perspectives, origin disciplines, and types of applications.

I recommend reading it. I'll make just some small comments for the recent third article :

(1). One of assertions in the article states:There were research groups within these companies engaged on similar projects to those in universities. Some of the groups ended up producing
prototype CEP products. In these cases, the decisions as to whether to let these
prototypes go forward to productization were haphazard, probably because they
were made by a management that didn’t understand the technology or its
potential.

Well - one must realize that corporate executives have infinite amount of wisdom, otherwise they have not been corporate executives, and if a decision looks haphazard, it is only due to the mental limitations of us, simple mortals.

(2). Another assertion is: But the largest number came out of an active database background. This is the reason why many of the commercial languages for event processing are
extensions of SQL
More accurately -- some of the current products we see are indeed descendants of "active databases" which was based on ECA (event condition action) rules. Among the products which apply this approach we can find RuleCore and Aptsoft (now Websphere Business Events); the products which extended SQL came from different paradigm in the database community of "data streams management" according to which, the queries are constant and data flows, instead of databases in which the data stands and queries flow. This has been later development which started with Jennifer Widom's Stream project; the two paradigms, though both came from the database community should not be mixed (although there are certain individuals who were involved in both).