Introducing Microsoft’s Platform for Complex Event Processing

Although most relational database applications are query-driven, event-driven applications have become increasingly important. Event-driven applications are characterized by high data rates, and millisecond latency requirements that make traditional store and query techniques impractical for timely and relevant processing of data. In contrast to the typical database scenario of hundreds of queries running for short durations against relatively static data, event-driven systems are characterized by a limited number of continuous queries running constantly against extremely dynamic data.

These requirements are shared by vertical markets such as manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities, financial services, health care, web analytics, and IT and data center monitoring. Event-driven applications use complex event processing (CEP) technology to identify meaningful patterns, relationships, and data abstractions from among seemingly unrelated events and to trigger immediate response actions.

This paper is an overview of the Microsoft platform for complex event processing. The Microsoft CEP platform allows software developers to create complex and innovative CEP solutions along two scenarios: (1) building packaged event-driven applications for low latency processing and (2) developing custom event-driven applications for business and the web with high throughput, low latency needs. The paper describes the architecture of the CEP platform and explains how to write continuous queries in a declarative manner to analyze and process events flowing through the system.

Download the Whitepaper: http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/D/5/FD5E855C-D895-45A8-9F3E-110AFADBE51A/Microsoft%20CEP%20Overview.docx