A Look Back at 2007: Making Leaps in Event Processing
12/26/2007
By Stephanie McReynolds, Director, Product Management, Oracle
Events are everywhere and the ways to capture and process these events into meaningful
business decisions are rapidly improving. Today, probes and sensors are deployed
in everything from IT networks to enterprise software systems and physical world
devices (through RFID readers, bar code scanners, manufacturing equipment sensors,
and others). As these systems continue to proliferate, they generate events at
a growing rate.
Increasing numbers of probes and sensors mean that not only data volumes are
on the rise, but the speed of data generation and the number of potential data
sources in any focused business process are on the rise. The financial services
industry has become the poster child of the convergence of these three trends.
The typical financial services organization processes upward of 150,000 events
per second, generated by an average of 10 different source systems. But events
abound in other industries as well.
Today's manufacturing lines monitor production through complex networks of
thousands of sensors evaluating processing times, product weights, and production
temperatures. It would not be unusual to see a manufacturer generating upward
of 35,000 events per second in this type of an environment.
Events are also proliferating in retail. In store locations, point-of-sale
systems create tens of thousands of events per second. Throughout the broader
retail supply chain, RFID technology puts retailers on a path to emitting hundreds
of thousands of item reads per second. One recent retail industry study for
RFID tagging at the item level estimated that 3 terabytes of events would be
created in just one week at just one store location. The need to sense these
events, filter them, and determine their relevance before in order to make an
appropriate business response is a significant market driver for a new class
of technology called complex event processing.
Event processing is not new; for 10 to 15 years, simple event processing has
been common. Database triggers, thin-client user interfaces, and message-oriented
middleware are all forms of event-based processing. But the output of these
technologies is low-level system information and processing. These simple events
are far removed from real business decisions like when to stop a potentially
fraudulent banking transaction, when to pause production on the manufacturing
floor, or when to pull a perishable retail product from the shelves because
it can no longer safely be consumed.
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