On "event at a time" vs. "set at a time" processing

Today I have broken life-long record in the length of a single session with the dentist --- more than 3 hours (I had to go out in the middle and restart the parking card which allows 2 hours at a time); this is time of setting up plans for next year and there are plenty of plans --- to be involved in 1/3 of my time in some activity, only when the number of "1/3 of your time" becomes bigger than 3, then the phrase "1/3 of your time" becomes tricky. Anyway -- today I would like to write about "event-at-a-time" and "set-at-a-time" processing, as it seems that people don't understand this issue well. We'll take it by examples:

• "event-at-a-time" is a processing type in which when an event is detected, this event is evaluated against the relevant patterns to determine if the addition of this event (together with possible more events) satisfies the pattern.
• "set-at-a-time" is a processing type in which patterns are evaluated against a set of events after all the set has been detected.

Examples:

• look at the pattern: And (E1, E2) -- when the relevant instance of E1 arrives this becomes a potential pattern, whenever the relevant instance of E2 arrives - then the pattern is satisfied. A concrete example: E1 = the buyer received the merchandise, E2 = the seller received the money for the same transaction. The order does not matter - the transaction is closed if both of them occurred. This is an "event-at-a-time" processing since it looks at each event individually when it comes and determined what is the state of that pattern- instance.
• look at the pattern: Increasing (E1.A) -- when the set of all relevant instances of E1 arrives - then the evaluation is done on the entire set. A concrete example: E1 = Temperature measurement, A = Value. When all the values (e.g. in a specific time window) arrive, there is an ability to determine if the values are indeed always increasing in time.

It is interesting to point out that patterns that are geared towards "event-at-a-time" can be implemented as "set-at-a-time", in this case, looking for patterns periodically instead of immediately, note that "set-at-a-time' does not necessarily means : time series processing, the size of the set may be unknown in advance, and the time difference between the different elements in the set may not be fixed.

It is also possible to implement "set-at-a-time" patterns using "event-at-a-time" - in an incremental fashion.

While some applications are better handled easily and more efficiently by one of these two styles -- some applications will need both, so hybrid processing will be required for those.

More on this - later.

On some EP related conferences

As I said all I had to say about the EDA vs. CEP issue, and does not wish again to get inside discussion of "what is CEP", I'll write today about some conferences in the event processing area. In the top of this page I've put the logo of DEBS 2009 which became the flagship research conference of the event processing community. The conference that has become ACM conference will include, like last year, industrial track that will contain - experience reports, architectures, interesting applications, and anything else of interest from the industrial perspective. We'll also try to solicit intermediate reports of the EPTS work-groups. Follow the call for papers in the conference website.

Another conference that announced extension in submission : the AAAI symposium on intelligent event processing - submission extended to November 13th.

Happy conferencing.