DEBS 2012 - keynote by Sethu raman

This morning started by some statistics about paper acceptance by Patrick Eugster, the PC chair. It seems that the acceptance rate in the scientific track was lower than previous years.  

The first keynote was given by Sethu Raman, who was until recently the "distinguished engineer" in Microsoft responsible for StreamInsights.    Sethu gave a relatively short talk (with a lot of questions and discussions) entitled "event processing solutions in the enterprise - a waypoint or launchpad". The illustration above is taken from his opening slides, he had such nice illustrations and citations all over.

You can download Sethu's presentation from the DEBS 2012 webpage (the organizers is doing a good job by copying the presentations from the presentation computer and posting it on the website quickly). 

The main message of Sethu is not surprising (as seen from the information management universe):

•  Event processing has a big potential to play in multiple roles -- real-time analytics,  ETL.  distributed query framework 
• It also plays in many different industries and is not a niche play
• There is a major issue is of conception.  There is aggressive messaging of the "analytics" community which drowns the event processing message in some cases,  The analytics community claim that they can solve all problems of the universe by database centered way, and that event processing is required only for small niche of very low latency requirements that cannot be satisfied by DBMS technology.
• The reality is that the value proposition of event processing is not restricted to the low latency, it is actually reducing the high cost of developing applications - however this message is not heard in a clear enough voice, relative to the other aggressive voices.
• The term "complex event processing" is a confusing term,

I have discussed it with Sethu in the break,  I actually agree to all the assertions.  The over-hype of analytics, and the messaging that comes sometimes from the analytics people (which is not really backed up by technical facts) makes the impression that analytics subsume the functionality that is proposed by event processing.   I am not sure how ling the over-hype of analytics will continue (I think this is quite high in the hype-cycle and will get to the disillusionment phase, since it is indeed over-hyped),  but the messaging of the event processing community about its ROI as complementary and sometimes contrasting to analytics should be cleared heard.   How? -- this is part of the discussion about the EPTS online magazine.

More - later 

On some authors' dilemmas

This is an illustration of the "prisoner's dilemma", a known concept from game theory. These days I am facing some smaller scale dilemmas that do not include decisions about imprisonment, but relate to the book that I am writing together with Peter Niblett - Event Processing in Action



After completing the first 1/3 of the book, the draft have been sent to many "anonymous reviewers". Yesterday I got the result of 11 reviewers, they generally liked the draft, some of them made comments that demonstrate some of the dilemmas of writing such a book. The dilemma stems from the fact that the target audience is not monolithic, and this is evident by variety of opinions. Which reminds me that many years ago I have taught a basic first-year ("freshmen") university course, and in this course there has been a lab in which the teaching assistant taught them some products (I think it was MS-Access), one of the teaching assistants told me that one student asked him what version of the software should be used, and another student asked him how to insert the floppy disk (remember?) to the disk drive. It was difficult to teach such heterogeneous audience. In the book target audience there is less polarization, but still there is a variety: people who are part of the "event processing community", people who are somewhat familiar with event processing (or think they are familiar), and people who don't know if event is written with "v" or with "w"... The target audience is further segmented to: developers that are interested only in the technical side, system architects / designers who are interested to understand principles, students or newcomers to the area, who are interested to study the area. One of the facets of this diversity is that one reviewer wrote that we should write more about the business motivation since the most important thing is to explain decision makers what is the value of event processing to the enterprise, while another reviewer thought that the introduction is boring and that we should move directly to chapter 3 that starts with the technical stuff. The way we chose is to have an introduction chapter provides an overview, gives ten different examples that represent different types of event processing application, explanation of the various reasons for doing event processing and some key terms. We decided that one introduction chapter is enough for those who want to get some notion of what is the motivation, and may still be of interest to those who already know or are not really interested in motivations, just in technical details. There is another book being written which is dedicated to the business side (by Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte) for those who would like to get a complete business oriented book - our book is more for the technical audience. For those who are not interested -- we'll recommend in the preface to skip this chapter. I'll write more about some other authors' dilemma in subsequent postings.