It’s an interesting observation that the largest suppliers of database technology have also dipped their toes into CEP technology (although some with more enthusiasm than others it seems) – Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Sybase… and maybe even Teradata. Most of these have naturally gone for event stream processing rather than other variants of CEP, utilising SQL-like query languages. But are they really just hedging their bets against the possible replacement of “big iron” databases with something more 21st Century, like in-memory datastores?
I was reminded of this when reviewing some of the features of TIBCO ActiveSpaces – TIBCO’s “big data” offering. Performance-at-network-speed – check. Persistence-support-for-failover – check. Reliance-on-DBAs-and-Big-Vendors – nope. Everything-done-via-SQL – nope. Transactional-integrity – OK, this is where things get interesting. Why run your transactions through a *file store* (a.k.a. traditional database)? Are not real-time reliable in-memory transactions possible some other way? Of course.
And it seems even DB afficionados are beginning to question the roles databases play in enterprises…
