I have been in a short vacation, and went with (some of) my family to see the film 2012, it is based on an ancient prophecy that the world as we know it will come to an end in December 21st, 2012 -- three more years to see whether this prophecy will come true.This time I would like to write about event processing functions, I have written about them before, just summarizing it in one place.
There are various functions under the roof of event processing, some applications need all of them, but many applications need only part of them, in various level of sophistications.
Here are the major functions that I have observed:
1. Event distribution: This is the most basic one, event consumers are disseminating events through some intermediate brokers (often called channels), the events may be filtered, but are transfered without change, where any processing occur within the consumer's premises and is not part of the event processing system. Pub/sub systems are of this type, and there is a lot of work about such systems in the distributed computing area.
2. Event transformation: This goes another step and send the consumers transformed events, where the transformation may be translation, aggregation, composition, enrichment, projection and split. Aggregation is probably the most notable use of transformation, and there are many applications whose main usage of event processing is transformation.
3. Event pattern matching: This function is to find whether any subset of the input events satisfy a predefined pattern.
Note that some systems require transformation only, some require pattern matching only, some require both, systems can also have different levels of sophistication in both. It may require very simple patterns only, or sophisticated patterns; likewise it may require very simple types of transformation or much more advanced ones.
4. Situation discovery / event pattern discovery: This function is to discover that some situation occurs without having a predefined patterns, using intelligent techniques. While the first three types of functions are more investigated (although I can't say that all issues are figured out), the fourth one is still a challenge, since there are some experiments, but generally it is not well established yet.
This also remind me of a different topic -- misconceptions around event processing, and I'll write about this topic soon.
