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It must be the time of the year to introduce new acronyms (or maybe I am just noticing more that have been around for a while). Oracle is touting Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) as a technology capable of dealing with the ever increasing data volumes which are predicted in most industries. The prize market is actually financial services where, as I previously wrote about in my Lustratus blog, the volume of market data is predicted to increase by 900% by 2012.

The business needs associated with this data deluge are not only storage – and in some cases storage is not relevant as the data has only transitory value. The greater value is in identifying the anomalies or unusual combinations that may correspond to the financial opportunity or a potential fraud. Oracle is clearly trying to address both the traditional transactional processing requirements and these new requirements which are more usually solved with Complex Event Processing tools.

As Oracle’s Dave Chappell puts it, XTP allows “transactions to occur in memory and not against the backend systems directly due to the need for extremely fast response rates, but still including transactional integrity” Fair enough.

However, he goes on to say something that Streambase and Apama (two CEP engine vendors) among others may be surprised to hear:

“Usually, a complex event processing engine is something that can also capture, correlate and apply decision rules to look for specific patterns in events over time and look for exceptions. However, there are certain applications that operate on streams of event data that is so voluminous that typical backend solutions or storage solutions just can't handle it.”

The whole purpose of CEP engines is to provide real-time analysis of massive event streams. My understanding is that to do this they precisely by avoiding using the backend solutions which Dave refers to. Which makes Dave's remarks rather confusing.

Stepping back however, it is clear that this announcement further demonstrates the growing interest among vendors in the potential value of the data deluge problem being solved. Whether the demand for these solutions will grow and break out of its traditional niches (algorithmic trading in financial services and some specialised security applications) is not yet clear.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in CEP • Financial Services • Product news |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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