In More Towards a Streaming SQL Standard, Marc Adler says, “Despite what I think about Streambase’s marketing and sales organization, you must admit that Zdonik and Cherniack are first-class researchers, and have contributed a lot to the field of CEP.”

I agree that these gentlemen are top notch researchers, witnessed by the fact that the authors do not mention nor claim to be “complex event processing” anywhere in their paper!  This paper is not about CEP, nor does it claim to be about CEP, it is about stream processing and unifying SQL standards.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes a unification of two different SQL extensions for streams and its associated semantics. We use the data models from Oracle and StreamBase as our examples. Oracle uses a time-based execution model while StreamBase uses a tuple-based execution model. Time-based execution provides a way to model simultaneity while tuple-based execution provides a way to react to primitive events as soon as they are seen by the system.

Asmentioned on numerous occasions, stream processing is a very important area in CEP/EP.   It is important not to confuse the higher situational knowledge from object-object correlation and state management with the single-object event refinement that occurs in stream processsing.    Event stream processing is fundamentally different than complex event processing. 

Event stream processing performs operations on streaming event objects.   In almost all advanced CEP/EP applications is is necessary to perform robust track and trace operations on streaming event objects, like tracking the position of an airplane.    Tracking the position of an aircraft can be modelled very nicely with event stream processing.  Tracking individual event objects is a precuror to multiclass object situation refinement.

When we manage the state of all the aircraft in the skies over New York, you need more than a stream processing construct.  You need to manage the state of all the aircraft.  Paul Vincent of TIBCO Software being to address this important point in The Value of State…  

Again, we will be better equiped to solve complex distributed event processing problems if we do not confuse the notion of event stream processing and complex event processing.   These technologies are indeed complimentary, both very important, but they are not the same.

I applaud Oracle and StreamBase’s work toward a unified standard for SQL extensions for streams.