Archives for July 2006

Looking for an interesting way to learn more about event stream processing?  Could you use a laugh after a long day of trying to get something done between meetings and email?  Then, you should check out StreamBase’s Da Vinci Coder Contest, and the related short film, a parody on the Da Vinci Code.

The first part of the contest is a series of weekly "Jousts".  To complete each joust, you need to discover secrets within StreamBase developer edition, the video, or "other" (easy to find) resources.  This week is joust #2.  Each weekly joust awards a prize ($1,000 range).  If you’re so inclined, you can choose a charitable donation.

The second part of the contest, starting August 14, is the "Grand Tournament".  This is a StreamBase application coding contest to win the coveted (?) title of "Da Vinci Coder" and a bigger prize ($10,000 range).

StreamBase, if you don’t know, is Mike Stonebraker’s latest company.  No surprise, StreamBase takes a database approach to the event/information stream processing problem.  StreamBase uses an SQL derivative (StreamSQL) to perform in-stream complex event processing.  The StreamBase product is based on Mike Stonebraker’s Aurora project.

I had a chance to meet with the StreamBase team earlier this year, and was definitely impressed.  This paper does a good job explaining the requirements for an event stream processing engine.

During the afternoon caffeine break of the OMG SOASIG meeting, I sat down with Bob Covington, CTO and co-founder of Rhysome, a provider of sense and respond (event-driven) technology.  In our quick conversation, I learned about Rhysome’s founders (former enterprise IT practitioners), how Rhysome’s products evolved, and what (in my view) makes them unique.

Rhysome’s original mission was to create a real-time reporting tool.  However, the team quickly recognized a gap – sensing and delivering relevant real-time information.  This led the team to the broader event-driven space: event detection, collection and processing. 

What’s unique about Rhysome is the focus isn’t solely on event processing.  Rhysome starts at the source – event detection and collection.  See left hand side of illustration copied from Rhysome’s site.

Rhysome describes the “smart cyber-sensors^tm” as follows:

• Detects and collects very small changes in both data and metadata from each information source in an enterprise, in real-time, using a native Event-Driven Architecture.

• Supports a wide range of information sources such as files, database transactions and schemas, logs (device, system application, and transactions), emails (both enterprise and web mail) instant messages (IM), SOAP messages, messages queues, HTTP, and Web content.

• Smart Cyber-Sensors run in the background with negligible or no impact on client or system performance, and no use of invasive database triggers.

• Dynamic filtering techniques remove non-relevant information at the source, significantly reducing implementation requirements and system overhead.

While designed as part of the broader Rhysome solution, the cyber-sensors can (and have) been incorporated in applications that require non-invasive tracking (think security and compliance) without the downstream complex event processing. 

When you start to think of the possibilities, mixing and matching sensors, services, events, business processes, information sources, and user interfaces, things get interesting.  With standards, to ease the interactions, it is even probable. 

For more on Rhysome, see their site.  [Shaded lenses recommended. :)]

[Note: This post was republished (unchanged) on July 13, 2006 at 3:22 due to Typepad system problems]