With the evolution of distributed IT systems and the advent of Web Services,
applications can now make more informed decisions by using real-time
information from third-party sources. For example, today's automated trading
applications can make over 30 trades a second by analyzing stock trends,
market movements, news, and events that may only be relevant for a fraction
of a second. A trading algorithm may infer a negative stock trend line for
the next tenth of a second and may short the stock for that bit of time.
Such applications require Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines. These
engines can detect patterns of activity from multiple data streams and infer
events continuously. Many critical CEP use cases require peak performance
from both the event engine and the data streams. In the example above, the
trading algorithm can't profit from making buys and sells in ... (more)