The book: Event Processing IN ACTION - is now out

I still need to write something about the vacation in Western Canada, but returning to the office today, I have received a package of copies of the EPIA book, that was just published. The project of writing this book (in my spare time) was quite demanding, and was twice longer than the original expectation. I have talked with some colleagues who wrote books for other publishers recently, and found out that relative to their experience, Manning has exceptional quality control procedures, with three reviews by readers during the book's development, and a multi-stage production process with a lot of iteration between the authors and various people on the production team -- technical proofreader, copy editor, proofreader and the production manager.

The acknowledgements section of the book also lists many people who helped in contributing ideas and review and the Manning team; I am also grateful to David Luckham who agreed to write the Forewords section. Last but not least -- working with a partner on such a project requires the ability to agree on many details, and a lot of interaction, many of them in evenings and weekends. My partner in writing this book, Peter Niblett, has complemented me since he came from a different perspective; Peter's drive for perfection has contributed considerably to the quality of the book, Peter is also a very pleasant person to work with.

I also noticed that Manning added a section explaining who is the person on the front cover (some people asked me).

Manning maintains an Authors forum that enables communicating with the authors, this forum helped us during the book's development process to get feedback, and a lot of the comments have been adopted (with acknowledgement to the appropriate person); this forum is being kept alive.

The book itself is printed in black and white, there is also a colored ebook version, available on the Manning's book webpage. The book also included a use-case that is known as FFD (Fast Flower Delivery), and has already several implementations in different languages, with more expected, this site will be kept as live site and is being hosted by EPTS. Interestingly, the FFD case has been used within the DEBS 2010 event processing architectures tutorial in order to demonstrate the architecture notions.

The book has served as basis for both academic and IBM internal courses, and I'll be able to share teaching material with anybody interested to use the book for that capacity.

Some other follow-up ideas is to provide comprehensive authoring tool for the model described in the book, work on automatic compilation from the book's model into various event processing languages and maybe to general programming languages as well -- these can all be nice students' projects, the model described in this book can also serve as a first iteration on standard in event processing application modeling. We'll see how much of the follow-up will be materialized.

Family vacation

Later today I am starting a family vacation -- this time in Western Canada, mostly in Alberta, but some in British Columbia. I'll be disconnected from the Internet during this vacation - back on the air in August 4.

DEBS 2010 - the rest of the conference

Cambridge is also a nice place to walk in besides the King's college, most days I found time to take walks around Cambridge, and in one of them crossed the Cam river. It is recommended to visit Cambridge, even if you don't visit the university.

DEBS last day and a half included talks of both the research and industry tracks on various topics. From our team - Ella Rabinovich has delivered two talks: one in the industry track summarizing the experience of Amit over the years (I have written some background for this paper recently), and the other in the research track on analyzing the behavior of event processing applications. We got a lot of interest and have follow-ups in possible research collaborations, I'll write in details about the behavior analysis work in the future.

In addition -- more keynote talks, and also a follow-up meeting to the Dagstuhl seminar.

Got back home -- travelling through London, and had some time to take a walk in Hyde Park.

DEBS 2010 has ended, it was great to meet many friends again, and now it is the time to start working on DEBS 2011.

DEBS 2010 -- first day of the main conference

The first day of the main conference yesterday ended in an organ recital in the King's College Chapel, seen in the picture, magic place - people keep talking about being in Hogwarts. The conference itself started with the first keynote by Mike Franklin who shared his experience both from his work in Berkeley and in his start-up Truviso. Mike's main motivation is to extend database technology to react in a continuous way in addition to the traditional batch way of analytics, and view batch as a special case of the continuous. The talk was a kind of "lite sell pitch", but had some good points, like the observation that a start-up can take a known technology and try to use it for new types of applications (which is what Turviso does), or devise a new technology and tries to attack existing applications better, but it is very difficult to do both at the same time (new technology and new applications). I think that the event processing area indeed tries to do both.

There were some other talks, mostly by graduate students. One of the interesting observations (not a new observation to me), that there is a lot of energy in this community to re-invent wheels, in different variations. I think that one of the good results in the database community of the relational model was that a large part of the research community took it as a basis and constructed the research on top of it, and people did not try to re-invent databases from scratch for every thesis. In event processing we are still not there, and IMHO the area will have more substantial results, if the research efforts will be more focused on advancing the state-of-the-art instead of re-inventing most and advancing a little bit (in the best case). Today we'll have follow-up meeting to the Dagstuhl seminar, and the research grand challenge we are discussing is aimed to that matter.

In the late afternoon there were a fast abstract session, where I gave a short (8 minutes, 4 slides) talk on the interactions between business rules and event processing (I'll write about this subject some other time), and then a session of demos and posters, with a couple of follow-ups for me.

More -later. The second day of the main conference is about to start.

DEBS 2010 --- tutorial days and our context related tutorial

This is King's College in Cambridge, a palace shaped building in which I am staying now, and in which the DEBS 2010 conference is being held. This nice picture was taken by Jacklyn Banergee and can be found is a website called Victorian Web. Cambridge is a very nice place and I took some time both yesterday evening and this evening to walk around. There was one thing in DEBS 2010 that reminded of DEBS 2008 in Rome -- it is July, the weather is quite hot, and this place is not very strong on air-conditioning (there is none in the guest rooms!)-- it seems that it is not an important part in the European culture.

The first day of the DEBS conference was yesterday - a PhD workshop, I have attended part of it, today was the tutorial day, I have attended two tutorials - the one about wireless sensor networks (the first half) and the second about event processing reference architectures - you can view the tutorial page of the DEBS 2010 conference for more details. We also had a tutorial that was delivered by Ella Rabinovich and myself on context related stuff. I have written about contexts several times in this Blog, and the tutorial provides some details about the roles of tutorial, in-depth look about tutorials, and implementation of tutorials in practice. I've uploaded the tutorial on slideshare, and you can view it from there, I hope that the rest of the tutorials will follow soon. Tomorrow - the paper presentation part is starting.

Announcing the EPTS awards

EPTS has announced on a competition to grant awards of two types:

The innovative application award, in cooperation with OMG Event Processing Community of Practice, will be awarded to an application that have used event processing in an innovative way.

The innovative principles award, will be awarded to a research contribution that had a significant impact on the state-of-the-art in event processing.

The competition is open to everybody. Deadline for nomination submissions is September 30, and the award will be given in November and will publicized in the media.

Full details about the award program can be found on the EPTS external website.

Next week in DEBS we'll hand out a flyer with the announcement and start communicating the award program

On Peter's Laws

I have written about the ten commandments of the intrapreneuring, here is something in the same spirit that I came across recently (though it is not new), the Peter's laws (not to be confused with the Peter principle), though they look as a piece of humor, they are indeed quite serious, some of them look to me as if I have written them myself (items 5, 7, 9, 10 in the list below - for example). If you can not read the picture below - here it is again in text form (though they are not totally identical). Enjoy!

1. If anything can go wrong, Fix it! (To hell with Murphy!)
2. When given a choice -- Take both!
3. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes.
4. Start at the top and work your way up.
5. Do it by the book...but be the author!
6. When forced to compromise, ask for more.
7. If you can't beat them, join them, and then beat them.
8. If it's worth doing, it's got to be done right now.
9. If you can't win, change the rules.
10. If you can't change the rules, ignore them.
11. When faced without a challenge, make one.
12. "No" simply means begin again at the next highest level.
13. Don't walk when you can run.
14. Bureaucracy is a challenge to the be conquered with a righteous attitude, an intolerance for stupidity, and bulldozer when necessary.
15. When in doubt: THINK!
16. Patience is a virtue but persistence to the point of success is a blessing.
17. The squeaky wheel gets replaced.
18. The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live.