Taking the complex out of complex event processing

The quote of this week is taken from an article in InformationAge that talks about operational intelligence. 

The article explains what operational intelligence means, and you can read it to see if you find anything new.

The point of this post is a quote done by Ivan Casanova from TIBCO:  

“We should all be focused on taking the 'complex' out of complex event processing" 

This quote is in the context of explaining the acquisition of Streambase by TIBCO.    I don't know Mr. Casanova personally, but what I have learned from his statement is that he believes that going forward, the programming model and tools represented by Streambase are better fit and less complex to use that TIBCO has done before, where it extended RETE based business rules system to handle stateful event processing cases, while retaining the rule-based programming model.    Streambase is using an "event flow" model that is some variation of event processing network.    Without getting to analysis of specific products (a restriction I have taken upon myself in this Blog), I would say that overall I believe that as a conceptual model for event processing I believe in the EPN model (which is of the family of data flow models),  and in visual working environment (better than textual working environments) to design and program.   This reduces the complexity for IT developers, which I think is very important trend.   The ultimate reduction of complexity requires one more step -  event processing modeling in the level of the business user level and automatic translation to an implementation language.  

Bottom line: I agree with the statement in the quote -- actually this is my main area of interest nowadays. 

On Hadoop and event processing

The region which I live in did not have much luck recently, first the big fire on the Carmel ridge, that lasted for three and half days until it got under control, and now a major storm, with winds running in velocity of >  100 KM/H  and a lot of rain.   These two pictures, taken from the Israeli news Internet sites, were taken in Haifa yesterday.   The storm is now over and some nicer days are ahead of us.


Back to professional issues -- Alex Alves (who represents Oracle in the EPTS Steering committee among other things) wrote a nice posting in his blog explaining the Hadoop programming model, if you are still not familiar with it, it provides good explanation. 


Hadoop is batch oriented and provides kind of imperative programming model, but can be wrapped and concealed by higher level language.     I am working now with a graduate student who investigates the usability of the map-reduce model for some of the event processing functions (e.g. aggregation).   I am curious  to see the analysis of this work.   More - later

On the straw and the waterfall

Tarrytown, NY. I have left Nashville this morning and arrived to Westchester county, NY, to do some IBM meetings on the way back from DEBS. I think that the nicest analogy I got from the conference came from Alex Buchmann keynote address, he used some other pictures, but provided the analogy that while regular programming is like drinking with a straw, this is good when the data is standing, while the data is moving, like in event processing, using the same kind of thinking is similar to use a straw to drink from a waterfall. I like this example. It requires some education to understand that event driven is a different paradigm of thinking, and this impact the way we should think about the programming model as well as the execution model of these types of applications. This also links to the discussion on education that will create a critical mass of developers who understand this paradigm. It is somewhat different, but it is not rocket science, with some education, I believe that it is doable.

I'll end with some travel anecdotes: Today I rented a car in the airport, got to the car and did not find a car key, just a remote control; it took me two minutes to understand that the remote control serves also as a car key, there is a hole in which it has to be inserted to, and when it is there, there is a on/off button which turns the engine on or off. I showed it to one of the people I've talked with in the place I visited and he told me that he has even more sophisticated electronic key that he does not need to insert it anywhere, it is enough that it is in his wallet that the car identifies it and enables to turn on the engine.

Another anecdote that always puzzles me is hotels' superstitions regarding the number 13. My Nashville hotel was semi superstitious, it did not have 13th floor, jumped from 12 to 14, however I have stayed in room 413. Now I am in a different hotel, this time in room 412. For curiosity I have looked for room 413, and did not find it, it seems that the level of superstition here is higher... I never understood this superstition, but this is not the only thing that I don't understand... Go figure.