Friday, February 13, 2009

On Quantum Leap in products


David Luckham posted on the complexevents site the question: Is there a commercial need for quantum leap in CEP products. David has also a continuation article that discusses event hierarchy abstractions as a quantum leap possibility. Before answering David's question let's me make some observations. Early in my career, 33 years ago, I have been a programmer in the Israeli Air-Force (the Air-Force was in opinion that letting me flying aircraft's will be too dangerous for the public safety...) and we have been early adopters of IMS, which has been relatively new, had severe performance issues, and needed a lot of manual tuning, and did not really work as advertised. IMS was actually a second generation database, it has a predecessor called DL/I and still used the DL/I language. IMS was a huge improvement over file systems that we have used before in level of abstractions, concurrency control, and many other utilities, yet it had many issues that have been resolved over time. The relational databases are actually the third generation of database systems and it also had a rough childhood, until query optimizations have been matured; The relational database has been a disruptive technology, and also had its own childhood problems, until query optimization have been better understood.

Back to event processing --- I assume that event processing products of 2019 will be totally different from those of 2009, the questions are:

  • Is there going to be a "disruptive technology" as the relational database has been in the database area, OR "just" gradual evolution will occur.
  • What will drive the progress to next generations ?
What will trigger the next generations ?
  • Customer requirements that require substantial change
  • Competitive pressure
  • Disruptive technology
  • (more reasons) ?
I'll leave these questions for now as a food for thought and will discuss them in subsequent postings.



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