Complex Event Processing

  • Article

Life isn’t fair, Microsoft bring out some new fangled gizmo, but I needed it five years ago. Back then I was working for several utility companies who were managing such things as water quality & half hour electricity meter readings for large customers.  Trapping and modeling the data either meant a lot of cludgy coding or forking out for some bespoke application that more or less did what you needed.

In 2010 all of this will be much easier to do thanks to Complex Event Processing (CEP) built on SQL Server:

clip_image002

Apologies for the quality of the diagram, but hopefully you can see the CEP engine in the big box on the middle which has input adapters  to connect to all sorts of sources and output adapter which can issue commands based on the events that have occurred in the form needed by the output device.  SQL Server sits underneath all of this to allow events to be aggregated and paired.

So what could you use it for:

  • clickstream analysis (web traffic),
  • telemetry including energy consumption as CEP can handle up to 10,000 events a second
  • electronic trading.
  • Possibly even Robotics.

If this is something you might be interested in then there is a whitepaper on it here, if it’s something you’re really interested in there is a special TAP program you can contact  Torsten Grabs, Microsoft Senior Program Manager for CEP.

Technorati Tags: Complex Event Porocessing,SQL Sevrer,LINQ,telemetry,clickstream analysis