Prof. Zicardi of ODBMS.org (remember ODBMS?[*1]) published an interesting interview with HP Fellow (and past RDBMS architect) Dr Goetz Graefe on the rising importance of “data storage” without the twirling-disks-thing. Of course this is a trend very much in evidence at customers of TIBCO with (”NoSQL”-type, or more accurately, “SQL-optional”) technologies like TIBCO BusinessEvents using distributed DataGrid technology for faster-than-disk / more-scale-than-a-single-process event correlating. And for those  looking to apply “diskless” to SOA as well as EDA, note that TIBCO ActiveSpaces now includes the TIBCO BusinessWorks interface for doing data distribution in BW processes…

With CEP we have long questioned the need to “bung everything onto disk” and instead process it (the incoming events) as they arrive… of course you will want a historic record for some events, but fundamentally you don’t usually want to follow the old-model of “put it in the database then worry about / process it later”. Unless you are an RDBMS sales guy anyway!

Notes:

*1. “Object-oriented” makes perfect sense until one tries too hard on encapsulation (of behavior). For example, a business rule relating new-order events with existing customers could be encapsulated in the order event or the customer event, but in reality should be in neither. Although you might want to be able to refer to related rules from either…

It’s an interesting observation that the largest suppliers of database technology have also dipped their toes into CEP technology (although some with more enthusiasm than others it seems) - Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Sybase… and maybe even Teradata. Most of these have naturally gone for event stream processing rather than other variants of CEP, utilising SQL-like query languages. But are they really just hedging their bets against the possible replacement of “big iron” databases with something more 21st Century, like in-memory datastores?

I was reminded of this when reviewing some of the features of TIBCO ActiveSpaces - TIBCO’s “big data” offering. Performance-at-network-speed - check. Persistence-support-for-failover - check. Reliance-on-DBAs-and-Big-Vendors - nope. Everything-done-via-SQL - nope. Transactional-integrity - OK, this is where things get interesting. Why run your transactions through a *file store* (a.k.a. traditional database)? Are not real-time reliable in-memory transactions possible some other way? Of course.

And it seems even DB afficionados are beginning to question the roles databases play in enterprises…

Another Press Release this week announced a merger between the 2 recent TIBCO acquisitions, Kabira and Netrics, and the ActiveSpaces data grid - which duly becomes a “product family”.

* TIBCO ActiveSpaces®, which is available now and will be renamed TIBCO ActiveSpaces® Data Grid, builds on a scalable peer-to-peer distribution model and provides the ability to store and analyze data in memory. Designed on the premise that today’s business is characterized by data in motion as well as data at rest, ActiveSpaces® Data Grid enables high-throughput, low-latency data processing to support the generation, consumption and evaluation of events that continually influence business operations in real time.

* Businesses often need to insure data integrity and consistency even in situations where extreme speed is required and traditional transaction managers would not be practical. To be built on the Kabira Transaction Platform, TIBCO ActiveSpaces® Transactions, which is scheduled to be available within the next 12 months, is being designed to meet this requirement by providing a fully distributed, in-memory transaction management mechanism. TIBCO acquired Kabira Technologies in late April for an undisclosed amount.

* Leveraging TIBCO’s acquisition of Netrics, TIBCO ActiveSpaces® Patterns, which is scheduled to be available within the next 12 months, will greatly accelerate transforming, rationalizing and making business sense of very large and potentially inconsistent data sets. The need to analyze data at rates far beyond traditional data access methods has become key as enterprises deal with real-time, event-driven operations and decision analysis. Using continuous, in-memory matching and subscription capabilities, ActiveSpaces® Patterns is being designed to provide mechanisms by which real-time data and event patterns can be evaluated appropriately matched even when the data is inconsistent and names or descriptions do not perfectly correlate.

Interested customers should contact their friendly TIBCO account rep forthwith!

… was the subject of today’s Forrester-IBM webinar on distributed cache technology, with both Forrester and IBM citing CEP and EDA as users for this technology, amongst others. The overriding driver for this tech being eXtreme Transaction Processing, which we might just refactor as eXtreme Event Processing for the purposes of this blog!

One minor quibble: John Rymer of Forrester did the introduction and during so classified the cache market as .NET, Java and NoSQL camps, with TIBCO placed in the Java camp. This might seem a fair classification of a complex market area, but of the 2 relevant TIBCO distributed cache offerings:

• TIBCO BusinessEvents, although Java-based, is more accurately described as a CEP product that embeds a distributed cache - it wouldn’t normally appear on a vendor list of distributed cache technologies;
• TIBCO ActiveSpaces is more accurately described as a data grid, but has .NET, C and Java interfaces. I’m sure other caching / data grid products have similar multiple interfaces - after all the client is just “an interface” to the cache /  grid.

Spare a thought in passing, though, for the OODBMS guys. Amongst this buzz about data grids and caching, I notice the Forrester blog is reporting that the Progress guys (disclosure: a TIBCO competitor in some areas) are now considering their ObjectStore OODBMS a “legacy platform”. Plus ça change, perhaps.

A few months ago we speculated that events (and event processing) “in the cloud” would probably appear best suited to some social networking type of application (in addition to the usual Platform-As-A-Service remote “systems center” use case). Lo and behold, TIBCO has introduced a corporate “twitter-type” service called tibbr for distributing messages across an organization, deployed into the cloud, and based on the TIBCO Silver cloud product. Soft of antithesis of MS Sharepoint…

For those wondering on the relevance of tibbr to TIBCO CEP technologies, note that TIBCO Silver exploits TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP technology under the covers. tibbr also exploits  TIBCO ActiveSpaces. As for tibbr potentially being used as an event channel for direct processing of tibbr messages in BusinessEvents - well this should certainly be possible, but finding some good use cases might be a challenge.