Has Phil Howard gotten tangled up?

[DLuckham]

I have been featuring Phillip Howard's article series, "Untangling Events" on the CEP website. parts I and II are already on it. But Part III came out today. See
http://www.it-director.com/technology/d ... ?cid=11137
What do you think?
Should it be featured on the website, ... or was he just under pressure to write something fast (always a mistake!).
-your thoughts
- David

[hgilde]

Log processing using collectors is a common use case for modern EP deployments. I will not be surprised to see more log processing vendors base their offerings on an EPL product.

The article is a little unfocused, I am not sure what the point is. But it's a blog - who is not guilty of that?

I am really not clear why he singles out this one product as being uniquely qualified for his use cases. It is not uniquely qualified. The parts of his post that talk about SQLStream look to be copied from their marketing materials, and he does not seem to be familiar with the capabilities of many products. Definitely gives a false impression of product comparison.

[DLuckham]

Hans

he does not seem to be familiar with the capabilities of many products. Definitely gives a false impression of product comparison.

I thought the same thing. - D

[PVincentTIBCO]

To me it looks like a "paid for analyst coverage" (aka advertorial), as I can't believe the author would not do some basic research and find:
- "It has the ability to process both CEP style events and log events (it is simply a question of building the right adapter, if it does not already exist)" - true for all CEP tools AFAIK
- "as well as what the company describes as continuous ETL (extract, transform and load)" - already a use case for existing CEP tools like TIBCO - http://tibcoblogs.com/cep/2007/11/24/cep-as-sauce-for-alphabet-soup-part-9-etl/
- "differences ... it operates in the database layer and not in the application server tier" - I guess the author hasn't heard of Oracle or Sybase (and their new Coral8-based features)? And I'm sure "app serving" is NOT the same as "event processing", and that v few CEP tools if any work against a conventional app server! In any case most CEP tools can access the DB layer if they need to...
- "operates in the database layer ... I regard this as a good thing because it should improve performance." OK, I spilt my coffee over that one! No disrespect to the DB guys, but if you could do all event processing in a standard database the CEP tool industry wouldn't have got out of bed!
- "has used SQL wherever it can so that extensions are minimal" - this has always been a selling point for all SQL-based stream processing tools?

So it looks like an advertorial or uninformed analysis - and hence David's dilemna. As I am not as polite as David I would feature it and rebuke it in the same entry! But kudos to the vendor involved for the gorilla marketing and increasing the awareness of CEP...

[hgilde]

So it looks like an advertorial or uninformed analysis .

Knowing the folks at SQLStream, it is probably not advertorial.