Oracle CEP Blog

Today is day three of Oracle OpenWorld 2009.  It's a huge conference again this year.  I haven't heard official statistics on the number of attendees yet.  The keynotes today and yesterday have really stressed the benefits of integration between Oracle's many products.  My favorite demo was the fast fashion retail demo during the keynote on Monday.  The amount of industry-specific knowledge that the presenters displayed was impressive.  The Dell portion of the keynote today was also quite good.  The CIO from Dell gave some compelling examples of the efficiencies and cost savings that they have achieved by using virtualization technology in their data centers.

There are a number of things happening at OpenWorld that are related to CEP.  We have a couple good demos running at the CEP booth in the DEMOgrounds.  For example, one of the demos uses CEP to track shoppers in a shopping mall that have signed up for a service which provides them with special deals and electronic coupons when they approach a particular store in the mall. The demo shows off the use of Oracle Spatial and CEP together.  If you are interested in CEP please stop by the booth -- it is located in Moscone West -- booth 99 -- in the northwest corner of the show floor. 

At 1 p.m. today there will be an Oracle CEP hands-on lab held at the Hilton Hotel.  The room is Continental Ballroom 5.  The lab will last for approximately 1 hour and give participants a chance to develop a running CEP application.

At 4 p.m. today there is a general session on CEP that will take place at the Westin Hotel.

Oracle Complex Event Processing, Caching, Algorithmic Trading, and Other ROIs
Maneesh Joshi, Oracle; Paul Shetler, Oracle; Perren Walker, Oracle
Tuesday 
10/13/2009
16:00 - 17:00
Westin Market Street Hotel

Hope to see you during the show.

Upon returning from vacation this week, I noticed that an interesting discussion had taken place on The Server Side about the use of Twitter as a source (and sink) of events for CEP engines/platforms.  A lot of the discussion focused on the merits (and morality) of using Twitter as a source of news for algorithmic trading applications.  The level of interest in querying Twitter data streams using CEP technology made me think that it would be worth mentioning how this can be done using the Oracle CEP product. 

As you may know if you are reading this blog, Oracle CEP is an all-Java platform for creating event-driven applications.  One of Oracle CEP's major strengths is that it provides a straightforward set of API's for writing the Java components that make up an event processing application.  In this case, we are interested in a particular type of component called an "adapter".  Adapters are responsible for connecting to external event sources and feeding events to the rest of the application and also for sending events generated by the application to external clients.  Twitter is an example of both an external event source and an external client that can receive events, so creating an Oracle CEP application that works with Twitter basically requires writing a "Twitter adapter".

I actually wrote a sample adapter several months ago using the Twitter4j open source library to simplify the adapter implementation.  For example, when using Twitter4j the adapter can retrieve data from Twitter using a single line of code:

List<Status> statuses = twitter.getPublicTimeline(lastTweet);

It doesn't get much easier than that!  Once the adapter has retrieved the data from Twitter it converts the data to an Oracle CEP event and then sends the event to any of its event listeners in the usual way:

streamSender.sendInsertEvent(statusEvent);

Hopefully, this short example has provided a flavor for the simplicity with which Twitter can be accessed from an Oracle CEP application.  I welcome any comments that people have on this topic, especially suggestions for new features that would enhance Oracle CEP's support for Twitter. 

The JavaOne 2009 Conference is happening next week in San Francisco.  It's nice to see what look to be some really interesting sessions on the schedule this year.  The topics that I find most interesting this time around tend to relate to the Spring framework, OSGi, map reduce, cloud computing, and of course Complex Event Processing (CEP).  There are two sessions on CEP this year that are being presented by members of the Oracle CEP team (the product that I work on):

TS-4544
An Introduction to Complex Event Processing on the Java™ Platform
Technical Session
Andy Piper, Oracle Corporation; Robin Smith, Oracle Corporation
Tuesday
June 02
4:40 PM - 5:40 PM
Esplanade 304-30

TS-4783

Design Patterns for Complex Event Processing
Technical Session
Alexandre Alves, Oracle Corporation; Shailendra Mishra, Oracle Corporation
Wednesday
June 03
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Esplanade 304-306

I would definitely recommend attending these sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday if you are interested in learning about CEP technology and how it can be used to build event-driven applications.

Waters has published a nice article on Oracle CEP.  The article describes why FXall used Oracle CEP to implement an algorithmic trading solution for foreign exchange markets, but the reasons for the selection apply in many different industries and application domains.  Here's my summary of the reasons given for choosing Oracle CEP:

• High-performance
• Great support
• Small learning curve for Java developers
• Low hardware costs
• Supports and encourages innovation

I have written an Oracle white paper, titled "Oracle Complex Event Processing and Distributed Caching", that describes how Oracle CEP can be used in conjunction with the Coherence data grid to provide RASP capabilities for event driven applications.  There is a sample application that goes along with the white paper, as well.  The white paper and sample application should be available on the OTN site soon.  I thought I would post a preliminary copy of them here since folks have been asking to see examples of how to use the two products together, and to get some feedback.  If you have any comments on the white paper or sample application, please post them.  You can download the bits by clicking on the links above.

Oracle Complex Event Processing 10g Release 3 (10.3) was released a few weeks ago (October 15, 2008).  This is the first new release of the rebranded WebLogic Event Server (WL EvS) product from BEA.  The Oracle CEP release  comes 15 months after the initial release of WL EvS.  It was a busy time, made even busier by the acquisition, but as always seems to have gone by way too fast.  The online documentation for Oracle CEP is available here.

The new features that the engineering team put in for this release include:

1. Data Grid support.  Distributed caching systems, like Oracle Coherence, are now integrated into the OCEP programming model.  This gives OCEP applications not only fast access to cached data, but also high availability (HA) for the data that they produce.  Oracle CEP 10.3 actually includes a Coherence OSGi bundle.
2. Clustering. The clustering support makes it possible to create a multi-server domain.  This is especially useful when deploying an applications that use a hot-hot architecture.
3. Event Record and Playback.  This feature allows events to be persisted and then played back later -- very useful for debugging or testing the effectiveness of new application logic.
4. Administration Console.  A new administration console -- also known as the "Visualizer".  The Visualizer allows administrators to manage and monitor OCEP applications.  The Visualizer was built using Adobe Flex.
5. Performance.  Lots of hardening work to make applications go really fast.  The performance guys never get enough credit for all the work they do.
6. And more.  The rest of the new features are listed on the documentation page.

A few readers have asked me to post an alternative link to our DEBS 2008 Paper on WebLogic Event Server (WL EvS) which I mentioned in my previous entry.  I've tested this link inside the Oracle Intranet.  If you try this link and find that it does not work for you, please let me know.

Greetings! I am one of the senior developers/architects working on Complex Event Processing at Oracle.  I joined Oracle a few months ago as part of the BEA acquisition. A lot has been happening since then.  In early July, I trekked off to Rome to attend the 2nd International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2008).  At the conference, I co-presented a paper titled, "WebLogic Event Server: A Lightweight, Modular Application Server for Event Processing" which gives a nice overview of WebLogic Event Server (WL EvS) from a technical perspective.  The paper is available online from the ACM.  DEBS was a great conference this year and I would recommend giving the proceedings a look if you are interested in the latest research or industry trends in event-based systems.

Some folks may be wondering what has happened to WL EvS (which was BEA's event processing offering) now that it is part of Oracle's product line.  WebLogic Event Server is now called Oracle Complex Event Processing (Oracle CEP) and is part of the Oracle Event-Driven Architecture Suite (Oracle EDA Suite).  The EDA Suite contains a number of products, including Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (Oracle BAM) among others.  I think it will benefit Event Server customers to have access to a more complete and integrated event processing solution.  For example, integration with the Oracle Coherence is very exciting, since BEA did not have a distributed caching product.

If you are planning to attend Oracle Open World 2008 next week in San Francisco, be sure to stop by the Oracle CEP/EDA booth to learn more.  We will have some interesting demos to show that highlight the cool things that developers can do with Oracle's EDA technology.  There is also a Session on CEP on Sunday afternoon at 3:45 p.m. at the Marriott (be sure to double check the time and place on the official conference website or program if you plan to attend the session).  Hope to see you in San Francisco!