Bob Hagmann from Aleri (ex-Coral8) has advocated "data flow" model as an underlying model that unifies both engines of Aleri, and contrasts it with "event delivery systems" in which programmers create state manually if needed. I am not really familiar with the phrase "event delivery system" and don't know what he refers to, but there are event processing systems that employ different programming styles from stream processing, in which states are handled implicitly by the system and the programmer does not really deal with creating states.
But -- I have no interest in "language wars", my interest these days is somewhat different -- to find a conceptual model that can express in a seamless way functionality that exists by different programming styles.
Actually the conceptual model of EPN (event processing network) can be thought as a kind of data flow (although I prefer the term event flow - as what is flowing is really events). The processing unit is EPA (Event Processing Agent). There are indeed two types of input to EPA, which can be called "set-at-a-time" and "event-at-a-time". Typically SQL based languages are more geared to "set-at-a-time", and other languages styles (like ECA rule) are working "event-at-a-time". From conceptual point of view, an EPA get events in channels, one input channels may be of a "stream" type, and in other, the event flow one-by-one. As there are some functions that are naturally set-oriented and other that are naturally event-at-a-time oriented, and application may not fall nicely into one of them, it makes sense to have kind of hybrid systems, and have EPN as the conceptual model on top of both of them...
This is the short answer. More detailed discussion -- later.
