Short Review – Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology

Having posted a number of long reviews regarding the Packt Publishing book Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g here is a brief review (also posted to Amazon UK)

Although the book’s introduction says that its target audience is developers and architects the first few chapters are a very good introduction to the ideas and goals if Complex Event Processing (CEP) that would be easy to get to grips with by anyone in the IT industry, explaining the ideas and illustrating them with easy to grasp real examples.

As the chapters go on the book increasingly delves into the specifics of the Oracle solution providing illustrations of the different aspects of the product from Continuous Query Language (the heart of the CEP capability) to OSGi and how it can be used to effect easy deployment. That said, there is a lot here regarding general good practice, and provide insight into what should be expected from a good CEP platform.

Unlike a number of Packt books I’ve seen, this doesn’t simply take a step by step, screen by screen tutorial approach where you tend to get sucked into following the steps, the book focuses on what and why. This does mean that a bit more thought is needed to follow the examples through – but that is no bad thing in my opinion.

See posts below for a far more detailed write up on this excellent book.

Review of Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g – Chapter 12

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, General, Packt, Technology

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This is the final chapter of the Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g, and unlike e rest of the book looks forward as to where Event Processing might go (and therefore Oracle) as well as a few observations on the Oracle solution itself. The obvious potential for Oracle is to bring the CEP tooling into JDeveloper rather than an Eclipse plugin as is presently the case.big JDeveloper gets the suggested changes (the book has no apparent link to Oracle product road map) would result in a more wizard centric approach to development.

In terms of technology approaches the only other major point made is the likely harmonization with SOA principles. What did surprise me is that the link to BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and BPM (Business Process Monitoring) wasn’t made despite the ever shrinking gap between business views onto data such that a business would be able to respond to to analysed events rather than BI reports well after the event. The most fascinating piece of this chapter is the relationship between CEP and Big Data (Hadoop etc) and the idea CEP could filter out data, or use Hadoop as a data source.

The rest of the chapter focuses more on possible directions for event processing in general, such as smart homes, cheaper devices feeding back more data allowing dynamic management and tracking of objects such as shipping containers and predictive analytics.

A well written chapter, but then by now you’d expect nothing less, but perhaps not as informative as the rest of the book, but then this chapter is far more speculative.

Overall Alexandre Alves, Robin J. Smith and Lloyd Williams should be very proud of the book and I hope that it sells well. As I said previously, this maybe geared to the Oracle product, but the way it has been written you could take the concepts and ideas and you could be confident of having some solid foundation understanding on any CEP solution.

Useful Links

Review of Introduction to Oracle Event Processing – chapters 10 & 11

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, General, Packt, Technology

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11g, book, CEP, events, Oracle, Packt, packtpub, review

The penultimate chapters don’t dive into the core Event Processing technology but look at some uses cases and the combination of CEP with Oracle’s spatial extensions and database capabilities. My initial reaction was that these chapters are perhaps more niche than I’d want, but when I thought a little longer it occurred to me that a lot of CEP use cases would include make use of spatial. Intact a system development I lead some years ago, if built today could be built using these features.

The book focuses on the idea of notifying people about a public transport service, but think about the great many mobile services evolving for smart phones given their push notification capability now you can see how e spatial features could offer a lot of value.

The chapters like everything else in this book are very well written, and worth reading.

If anything the questions left in my mind, are more commercial dimensions of such a technology – enterprise Oracle database which contains a number of the special feature is not cheap, and I’d imagine that the spatial cartridge isn’t cheap. This leads me to a natural next question, given the common application scenarios like e one described, has anyone stood up a SaaS service using this technology, and how cost effective/competitive/attractive would it be?

As you can see a thought provoking book.