Analyze and Act on Fast Moving Data: An Overview of Complex Event Processing
In the capital markets, things happen fast. The markets move fast, positions change fast. Reacting quickly is the key to increasing profit and/or managing risk. Whether it’s an automated trading application or market making application that needs to react to market movements instantly, or a risk manager that wants to see the firm’s exposure updated continuously throughout the day, it all comes down to the ability to analyze data arriving from multiple sources, at very high rates, in real-time.
This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to the capital markets. In addition to financial services, many industries, including telecommunications and networking, logistics and transportation, and government, are experiencing the same challenges of growth in data volumes, acceleration of rates at which data is received or created, along with increasing business pressure to be able to analyze the data and act on it in real-time to maximize profit and/or to reduce risk.
Complex event processing technology (CEP) provides an innovative approach to deriving intelligence from event data in real-time. As a platform for application development, it provides high level tools for defining how events will be processed and analyzed. As an engine for an Event Driven Architecture (EDA) it provides the “brains” to absorb, aggregate, correlate and analyze events, producing new high-level events that can trigger a response as well as producing high-level information that shows the current state of the business. It lets you easily define logic that will be applied to incoming events (i.e. messages) to do things such as:
- Combine data from multiple sources, producing derived streams with richer and more complete information.
- Compute value-added information to enable rapid decision-making.
- Watch for specific conditions or patterns to enable instantaneous response.
- Produce high-level information, such as summary data, statistics, and trends to be able to see the big picture, or the net effect, of many individual events.
- Continuously re-compute key operating values based on complex analysis of incoming data.
- Collect raw and/or result data into a historical database for historical analysis and/or compliance.
This paper is intended to introduce you to the concepts underlying complex event processing and the benefits that can be gained by building event processing applications using the Sybase Aleri Streaming Platform, the most complete enterprise-level complex event processing technology available for today’s demanding requirements.
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