01-29-2009
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Forum Robot Girl
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Join Date: Sep 2000
Posts: 22,144
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On state processing and event processing
2009-01-29T08:51:00.006+02:00
Yesterday, I got visited by my (now- Ex) Master student Elad Margalit, about his thesis regarding dynamic setting of traffic light policies I have written before. For some strange reason he decided that I deserve a gift for his graduation so he brought me a "flip clock" that looks like this. Strangely enough it switches the labels to show the correct time, all people who somehow got to my office yesterday thought it is a cool gadget, and it is now located in front of my eyes.
Today's topic is some echo to the discussion started by my friend and ex-IBM colleague Claudi AKA patternstorm on the forum in the complexevents site. Claudi has defined state as a sequence of events, while several others answered that this is not really the definition.
Before getting to definition, there was also very concrete motivation that Claudi mentioned -- if we equate state to "sequence of transitions" than state processing becomes a kind of event processing. I think that it is important to discuss this statement.
While state is not exactly a sequence of transitions, it is true that the value represented by the state can be reconstructed if we apply the series of transitions on an initial state, and considering that the initial transition is null and the first transition creates the state, we can obtain all information as part of series of transitions.
Let's take a simple example. The state represents the value of my balance in the bank checking account. The transitions start from a one that opens this account, going through deposits, withdrawals, commissions of the bank etc.. I have opened my current checking account in 1984. Assuming that I would like to process this state, such as getting an alert everytime that my account balance becomes negative (unlike the USA, in Israel overdraft is a common practice). I can make it an event processing activity by taking all transition from 1984 and reconstruct the state with each new transition, however, this is not an efficient way to do it, first I'll need to keep all the historical transitions forever, second, it is much more cost-effective to maintain the balance as an entity, and process it.
State processing and event processing are complementary, in states processing we are processing the snapshot of the present time, while in event processing we process the history of transitions. If I want to get alert on overdraft -- this is state processing, If a compliance officer looking for money laundering suspect is seeking if three deposits with more than $10,000 each were done to my account within a single week, he is doing event processing. In reality we need both, but each of them has other techniques for its cost-effective processing.
More on this topic -- later.
Source...
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