Greg Reemler
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 01:17:58 +0000

Reducing complex problems sets to simple problem sets is an interesting, and sometimes valid,*approach to complex event processing.*** Transformations can be useful, especially when well defined.
For example, CEP was evisioned as a new technology to debug relatively large distributed systems,*discover hidden causal relationships in seemingly disconnected event space.*** This “discovery” requires backwards chaining with uncertainty, for example.* Most of the current so-called “CEP software”*(on the market today (including Marc Adler’s SQL-based examples)*do not*perform backwards chaining (with uncertainty).** This is also true from other so-called CEP products, like*most forward chaining*RETE engines*- for example, see this post.
Marc*Adler says*he is, “hunting for advice from people who might have implemented event clouds in Coral8, Streambase, and Aleri, all three which are based on SQL.”
Current steaming SQL engines*cannot*model*true event clouds without reducing the cloud to causal-ordered*sets of linear steaming*data.** These software tools are stream processing engines that process events in a time window of continuous streaming data.* These products*are not, in reality,*CEP engines -*calling them*”CEP*engines”*is marketing-speak, not technology-speak!
Reducing complex models to simple ones is*a valid technique for problem solving.* Likewise, eliminating uncertainty and assuming causality is a way to reduce complexity.*
CEP was envisioned to*discover causal relationships in complex, uncertain,*”cloudy*data”*and the current state-of-the-art of software from the streaming SQL vendors do not have this capability, unless you reduce all event models to ordered sets of streaming data (reduce POSETS to TOSETS).
Reductionism*can be*a valid technique, of course.* We can eliminate uncertainty, force strict determinism, demand apriori system rules and perform all sorts of tricks to permit us to reduce complex problems to simple ones.**
However this also*resulting in*reducing CEP* (complex event processing) to SEP (simple event processing).**
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