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.

Introduction to Oracle Event Processing – Chapters 6-9

15 Saturday Jun 2013

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Continuing to look at the Introduction to Oracle Event Processing book, by chapter 6 the books has covered the key principles and ideas for building a CEP solution, and we’re now need to consider deployment. But refreshingly the book also takes on a number of non functional requirement (NFR) areas such as the issue of monitoring, a subject area that many technical books tend to ignore. The attention to monitoring is admittedly driven by the fact that Event Processing is inherently sensitive to timing and system loading etc and will obviously have a direct impact on what outcomes are produced.

As the book takes you through aspects of building a simple solution – the CEP equivalent to writing ‘Hello World’ it would be great if the authors could make the implementation available for download, so you could go straight into deployment.

Chapter 7, then takes us into other performance improving aspects such as how to get event enrichment data, and importantly exploit caching to drive the performance. If you’re familiar with Coherence then this aspect should be pretty easy to get to grips with, and the book actually focuses on the OEP aspects of the setup. If you don’t know Coherence, you’d do well to look at additional sources of information.

Chapter 9 is a natural evolution of 8 as further develops performance thinking with clustering and with it High Availability dimensions.

Before looking at High Availability (HA) and scaling the book drives back into more advanced scenarios with CQL by introducing Java into the syntax.

Introduction to Oracle Event Processing – Chapters 3, 4 & 5

09 Sunday Jun 2013

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Continuing with the review of the Packt book Introduction to Oracle Event Processing (OEP) we find chapters 3,4 and 5 take a far more indepth dive into the product, what it can do and how to implement the features with examples of why you might want to use different features and capabilities. Chapter 5 focuses specifically on the Complex Query Language (CQL) syntax which is a SQL based expression language for querying events and describing expressions with an obvious emphasis on time series data.

As the book isn’t a blow by blow, screen shoot by screen guide through creating an example application using OEP you are going to need to apply a bit of effort now in utilising the ideas and capabilities being explained here.

A very well executed set of chapters.

Introduction to Oracle Event Processing – Chapter 2

02 Sunday Jun 2013

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Chapter 2 of the Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing book is really two smaller chapters introducing the platform in terms of its history, building blocks and the challenges that have had to be solved in the creation of an event processing platform (such as managing the potential impact of the garbage collector when handling very high event rates).

Not many books go into the underlying details of how a product is created, but in doing so the authors have provided a lot insight into the art of the possible and avenues for developing further understanding.

The second half of the chapter walks through the use of a demo scenario. Rather than providing details from standard Oracle manuals in a click by click type of guide, the book uses the example to show a flavour of breadth and depth of the tool.

This chapter doesn’t try to describe the installation process, but points you to the Oracle documentation and explains what it should guide you through.

Even if you don’t intend to exercise the demo, it is well worth reading the chapter to understand the construction and breadth of the tool. Based on what has been shown here, I believe some of the Oracle products such as AIA tooling could learn from it.

Chapter 1 of introduction to Event Processing

29 Wednesday May 2013

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

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Although the book’s introduction says that its target audience is developers and architects the first chapter is a very good introduction to the ideas and goals of Complex Event Processing (CEP) for anyone in the IT industry. The chapter explains the ideas and goals of CEP illustrating them with easy to grasp real examples.

Possibly one if the best starts to a Packt book I’ve seen.

If your going to get stuck in with the more practical pieces then I’d start downloading the tools from Oracle as early as possible as there is several GBs of software. You might also consider cheating by downloading a prebuilt VirtualBox with the majority of the software already installed and configured.

OSGi In Depth – A Review

29 Friday Apr 2011

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Technology

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OSGi In Depth

When I first came across OSGI In Depth (was originally called Enterprise OSGi In Action during its Manning draft stages) I had to ask myself whether the same publishing house could justify another book on OSGi when they had already published OSGi In Action a year or so before.

Having now read both I have to say that there is a case for both, yes there is a degree of overlap – but that is necessary to set background. The In Depth book is very much geared up for architects and looks at the technology from a architecture and design consideration with some very honest insights and good practices. The In Action is better suited to developers that need to know about all the different interfaces. The two books are very complimentary, where to start obviously depends upon where you’re approaching OSGi from.

In Depth can at times feel feel a little be discouraging read, but upon reflection what you’re reading is actually very honest worts and all set of insights. Lets be honest how many J2EE books go into the challenges, and headaches of getting entity EJBs to be highly performant, not to mention the deployment challenges that could be faced with versioning of the underlying database if your selling production solutions that should be easy to upgrade.

When you get past this, there are some seriously valuable insights into possible dead ends that you could go down or catch you out later on if you don’t do that up front thinking about how you want to package, deploy and upgrade during the earlier phases of a development programme.

The book illustrates the way to address a number of these, and provides a number of design patterns. The book does miss a trick of providing these patterns as an appendix where they can be easily referred to for reference only.

Over all this is a valuable read, particularly you’re looking at OSGi from an architectural perspective (as I am). Rather than try and review each chapter I have developed a mind map to help show content of each part of the book (of course this means I have a memory jog if I need to come back to specific issues). The mind map of this can be found at http://www.mp3monster.org/new/techie/MindMaps/OSGi-In-Depth.shtml