Friday, June 26, 2009

On criteria for evaluation of event processing products

Yesterday, I spent much of the evening in Nofim elementary school, my youngest daughter Daphna, is graduating from elementary school, and they have done their grand celebration, with a lot of speeches, and performance of the children in signing, dancing and playing. It was nice, but somewhat long (the speeches part), and they have done it outside in the hottest day of the year (so far).





Another experience is that I needed to replace the door lock cylinder in my former apartment, since she is going to rent it now. I know that the Americans tend to do everything (including oil change in cars) by themselves, when I joined IBM, I was surprised to discover that I am now a "technical person", actually my current IBM title is - IBM Senior Technical Staff Member; I have never thought about software development as a technical activity, in my mind, a technical person is a person that knows how to hold a screwdriver properly, a skill I never possessed, so I looked at the Internet and called a person whose profession is to do that, we set a meeting at 6PM, and I went out in the middle of a meeting to go there, at 6:10PM I called him, he said: the person is on his way, will be there within 10-15 minutes, I waited until 6:30, and my patient started to run out, I called again -- the answer: he is almost there, give him couple of minutes. I called again in 6:40, got the same answer. My last call was in 6:48, saying -- I am cancelling this order, and will try to find another one that when he says 6:00 he really means it. Today I called another guy from the Internet, and again set a meeting with him at 6:00PM, this time I called him before leaving home, and he said -- I'll be there in 30 minutes, and indeed, he was there 25 minutes later, and changed the lock. I told him that I am happy to see that there are some professional people who arrive on time, and he said that he as also a customer hates service people who are late... I always thought on punctuality as a value, unfortunately, I am (almost) the only one in my family who has a sense of time.
Anyway, I got today some spreadsheet that an analyst made to evaluate various event processing products, the good thing is that people are trying to devise such criteria, however, looking at the criteria there, my observation is that the people devised this list came with a long laundry list of criteria, many of them seem to me irrelevant for many of the applications I know, while others that I would imagine that will be there, are left out, or treated in a shallow way. This gets me back to the difficulty of devising performance benchmarks in this area.

My observation is that the event processing area is not monolithic; people are using event processing for different reasons, and have different functional and non-functional requirements and priorities. Trying to think in a monolithic way, may yield a result that is not valid for anybody. I think that there should be deeper research in this area and provide criteria for classes of applications; this classification is not easy, as the diversity of applications that each individual organization or vendor has, is limited. This is one of the things that require a community effort, and I hope that the EPTS use case working group will be able to provide it, so I am looking forward to hear their tutorial in DEBS 2009. This also relates to our goal of establishing event processing manifesto, which will be the main theme of the event processing Dagstuhl seminar in May 2010. Stay tuned for more.

Monday, June 22, 2009

More on Twitter as an event source


I have written sometimes ago about creative use of Twitter as an event source; the recent days riots in Iran, where strict media censorship is imposed, indicate the role of means like Twitter. It turns out that Twitter has a major role in communicating to the outside world what is happening in Iran. The state department has asked Twitter to cancel scheduled maintenance to keep Twitter up and running all day. To all people who doubt the power of what can be expressed in 140 characters, it seems that Twitter is becoming a major event source in our universe, due to the ease of connecting it from everywhere. Of course, one can abuse any event source and send false information, but the mass quantity exposes the truth. I'll revisit text messages as event sources in later posts.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

On the DEBS Event Processing Languages Tutorial

In the picture you can see manuscripts in some languages that require some expertise to parse...
Today I spent some time working on my part in the DEBS tutorial day entitled - Event Processing Language Tutorial, on behalf of the language analysis workgroup of EPTS. For this occasion we have also also launched an EPTS presentation logo, designed by Tammy Dekel, the graphical designer of my lab who also designed the EPTS logo.




The presentation starts with the following observation



and will include -- introduction including the language dimensions identified by the EPTS Language analysis workgroups, in-depth description of: SQL based languages, rule based languages, and EPA based languages, and then some advanced topics like: temporal properties, development environments and logic based semantics. The presentation is being prepared in a team work, and also be presented jointly by some of the members. We shall post the final version publicly, after the conference -- we need to finish it first.

There will be some more interesting tutorials in DEBS 2009 including the tutorial of the EPTS use case work group, a tutorial about event processing in capital markets, a tutorial about event processing in sensor networks and more. I am planned to be in Nashville for the DEBS conference, two weeks from now, and will report on the conference in this Blog. Stay tuned.