Recently, the EPTS architecture working group, which I am part of, presented its reference architecture for event processing at DEBS 2010, which was realized at Cambridge in July 12th. The presentation can be found at SlideShare.
The presentation first highlights general concepts around event processing and reference architecture models, the latter based upon IEEE. This is needed for us to be able to normalize the architectures of the different vendors and players to be presented into a cohesive set. Following, individual architectures were presented from University of Trento (Themis Palpanas), TIBCO (Paul Vincent), Oracle (myself), and IBM (Catherine Moxey).
Following, I include the functional view for Oracle’s EP reference architecture:
The pattern for each architecture presentation is to describe different views of the system, in particular a conceptual view, a logical view, a functional view, and a deployment view. Finally, a common event-processing use-case, specifically the Fast-Flower-Delivery use-case, was selected to be mapped to each architecture, thus showing how each architecture models and solves this same problem.
Having exposed the different architectures, we then collide all into a single reference model, which becomes the EPTS reference architecture for Event Processing.
What are the next steps?
We need to further select event processing use-cases and to continue applying them to the reference architecture, hopefully fine-tuning it and expanding it. In particular, I feel we should tackle some distributed CEP scenarios, in an attempt to improve our deployment models and validate the logical and functional views.
Furthermore, I should also mention that at Oracle we are also working on a general EDA architecture that collaborates with SOA. More on this subject later.
A World of Events 