Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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September 04, 2008
Why Complex Event Processing Matters "If the NYSE doesn't know this until a half-hour before close of trading, and traders discover they have 500,000 trades still in flight, they suffer the penalty of not having everything submitted to the Fed as completed trades: heavy penalties ensue. If we could monitor the event or know about it in advance, we can use operational monitoring to fix the problem in real time and mitigate the impact to an acceptable level of exposure." Richard Schreiber of Nastel has published a compelling argument here at the ebizQ community for connecting the dots between SOA and complex event processing (CEP). In the case of the NYSE example here, he notes that "if the systems were provisioned well enough in advance, which SOA enables through messaging among internal and external applications, they would have hours to adjust expectations, and know whether they would be able to complete the trades or not. They might be able to re-provision and complete more trades. Notification to the Fed could be earlier, penalties would be mitigated if not eliminated. Timely, pertinent information would minimize the impact." However, the challenge is handling a tsumani of information that pours into our enterprises ever day. How do we separate the valuable nuggets of data from the rest of the flood? Schreiber says automation is the key to handling all this complexity, and complex event processing software is the vehicle that will deliver that automation. "Complex Event Processing software can whip the information maelstrom into a benign enterprise resource. CEP is a framework that can reduce the time, cost, and risk of certain decisions. In a complex world, individual data points or streams are not adequate," he explains. "They’re point solutions in a world requiring a system, viewed with a single gauge, a dashboard." Part I of Schreiber's view into the possibilities of SOA and CEP is here, Part II can be found here. _____________________________________________________________________ Posted by joemckendrick in Event Processing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) September 01, 2008Extreme Transaction Processing -- for Very Busy SOAs Extreme Transaction Processing... the term alone evokes images of massively huge streams of data roaring through enterprise applications. Like the huge turbines that capture the raw energy of thousands of tons of water surging each second through the hydroelectric dams of northern Quebec and Ontario. The ability to capture huge data flows is what's been powering business at a leading Canadian online bookstore site, AbeBooks.com, which has harnessed the power of XTP as part of its service oriented architecture. In recent posts, Rich Seeley documented the AbeBooks project, how it works, and what it means. Rich reported that the site, which processes more than 30,000 orders a day and updates millions of titles in real time across its inventory, employs Oracle Coherence, a distributed in-memory data grid designed for XTP environments. The platform automatically partitions data in-memory across multiple servers -- making data access lightening fast compared to the usual approach of reading and writing data from disks. XTP and its sibling, complex event processing (CEP), are potentially killer apps for SOA, Rich observes. Abebooks.com manages a database of more than 110 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books via Web services links to 13,500 booksellers. Previously, transactions hit the back-end databases directly. Leith Painter, manager of development at AbeBooks, said the next step toward an SOA implementation is to put the Oracle Fusion component on its own tier so that it can be used by other applications support the online marketplace for books. "We're in the first stages of design and implementation of service-oriented architecture. We're sponsoring it from an IT level. We've got some initial services we've developed in a design phase, and we're currently developing design principles." __________________________________________________________________ Posted by joemckendrick in Event Processing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) August 29, 2008Analyst: Focus Like a Laser Beam with SOA Projects Successful SOA projects seems to have one thing in common -- they were developed on an incremental basis. The same principal extends to SOA governance itself, says Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "You can really go too far too fast and end up with processes that are very overweight considering what you’re really doing with them. An incremental approach is probably a good way to go. The big pitfall to avoid is building out a lot more governance than you need given where you are in your SOA journey." My ebizQ colleague Peter Schooff just wrapped up a podcast with Larry, who will be a keynoter at ebizQ's upcoming virtual conference on SOA governance. Larry emphasized launching SOA and SOA governance with a tight focus -- concentrate on "those things that are most relevant to a starting-out position and then evolve your way into some of the other things." It's important to get buy-in to SOA efforts, and have a clean, well-streamlined process for managing the creation, maintenance, and retiring of services. And then the second best practice that I think is very important is that you really do need when you put any kind of process together that’s going to be business process within IT, you want to make sure that process is well understood. ___________________________________________________________________ Posted by joemckendrick in Management • SOA • SOA Research and Analyst Reports | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |
