Why did Sybase get Aleri?
I have tried to google around for something about the Sybase/Aleri deal. There is lots of the normal "information" which is corporate blahblabla without any substance. But I found one piece of info that actually have something interesting in it about what Sybase might have in mind for Aleri:
"In addition to slashing latency, CEP can also help to reduce warehouse storage requirements and help tame problems that were heretofore too costly to solve. By conducting analysis of a stream as it arrives, much of needed analysis and aggregation can be done without persisting details to the warehouse at all. If your data has no retention requirements, other than your analysis needs, you may be able to use CEP to greatly reduce your warehouse costs." – http://www.beyeblogs.com/sybaseiq/archive/2010/02/inastreamofgood.php
Analytic BI + nifty real-time front-end for the datawarehousing guys would seem like a pretty good use for the Coral8 engine, I just assume that they will use the Coral8 engine and throw away the rest.
Apart from that, I don’t think this deal will turn into anything significant for the CEP community. Sybase will add some real-time features and give some nice shiny toys for their capital market customers that can be used to game the markets even further. But I don’t think they will have a generic CEP engine to offer in the future.
So Sybase seems to be focusing on developing prebuilt solutions for specific markets. I think it will be important to see whether this sells better than the general CorAleri tools.
Marco – While I/we definitely see the value in using CEP to collect, aggregate and even filter information before adding it to a data warehouse, I couldn’t disagree stronger with your assertion that Sybase won’t have a generic CEP engine in the future. Sybase is very intent on building off the existing Aleri (and Coral8) CEP technology and will continue to be a leading provider of general purpose CEP technology. We will also be offering CEP-based applications such at the Liquidity Managemet and Market Liquidity Analysis products from Aleri – in addition to, not in place of, the CEP platform.
@Jeff Wootton
I would be delighted if Sybase will indeed offer a stand alone CEP product. Obviously it would probably be integrated with other products from Sybase, but if it is also usable without any other Sybase products then it would be great for the CEP community. Why I have (had) my doubts, is that a DB vendor might have a hard time in explaining why there is a need for a separate product doing streaming queries. Could not that be added as a feature to the regular RDBMS? Oracle seems to take that route with CQL and it makes lots of sense as the syntax and concepts of these streaming SQL tools are so similar to SQL and fits nicely into an RDBMS.
But I think it will be interesting to see if Sybase can be a bit more innovative about this. The route Oracle seem to go with CQL is in my opinion not the optimal one for event processing. With the combined source code of Aleri and Coral8 I think Sybase could create more innovative event processing solutions.
No, Oracle CQL and current Oracle CEP product has nothing to do with the Oracle DB. It actually belongs to the middleware business unit and is built upon former BEA event server with its OSGi programming model. Not available standalone neither but bundled with SOA or BAM very large bundles.
@Alex
Alex, you are of course right. I got confused about all the acronyms here. What I mean is Oracle Continuous Query Notification – CQN. Not CQL. With CQN, you can register a query and get back the result whenever the result changes. Which is on a conceptual level rather similar to what many of the CEP vendors SQL based tools are doing. I thought it would be a smart move for other db vendors, like Sybase, to add this kind of functionality. With CQN there is less need for a stand-alone CEP procuct which uses SQL, your “normal” RDBMS can already do continious queries. If one could add CEP like features into the base product, which I think Oracle are starting to do with CQN, then I think many DBAs would prefer to use those features instead of bothering with a separate product.
My guess is that is only a matter of time when most database vendors add some kind of continuous processing features to their regular SQL database.
CQN: http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/appdev.111/b28424/adfns_cqn.htm
Microsoft has the StreamInsight, IBM has Websphere Business Events and IfoSphere Streams, Oracle has CEP — so Sybase got one too. What are they going to do with it, remains to be seen — mergers and acquisitions tend to target perceived stock value and the customer base, not necessarily the technology.
I don’t think any architect would think putting CQN in a database would equal deploying a CEP platform.
The question is what a CEP platform can do that can not be done using CQN. The combination of a RDBMS with features like CQN gives a “good enough” solution for many types of CEP problems. But of course they are not created equal.
Just to throw a spanner in: the CQN concept is great in theory – but in practice Oracle just tells you that the results of your registered/subscribed query may have changed. You still need to reissue the SQL query to find out HOW they’ve changed (more rows, fewer rows, different values?). CQN doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be false positives, and depending on how you subscribe, there may also be false negatives. So CQN in its current form is unlikely to be very helpful if you are dealing with a deluge of incoming data/events.
No, CQN is not a replacement for a proper CEP system. But for a class of problems I could come pretty far by knowing when it is time to re-run my query as the results might, or might not, be changed. It is a CEPish feature that could be used for many types of solutions where active behavior is required and the option would otherwise be to do insane amounts of polling. So see it as a replacement for polling and other tricks instead of a proper CEP engine replacement.