esper.codehaus.org and espertech.comDocumentation

Chapter 1. Technology Overview

1.1. Introduction to CEP and event stream analysis
1.2. CEP and relational databases
1.3. The Esper engine for CEP
1.4. Required 3rd Party Libraries

1.1. Introduction to CEP and event stream analysis

The Esper engine has been developed to address the requirements of applications that analyze and react to events. Some typical examples of applications are:

What these applications have in common is the requirement to process events (or messages) in real-time or near real-time. This is sometimes referred to as complex event processing (CEP) and event stream analysis. Key considerations for these types of applications are throughput, latency and the complexity of the logic required.

The Esper engine was designed to make it easier to build and extend CEP applications.

1.2. CEP and relational databases

Relational databases and the standard query language (SQL) are designed for applications in which most data is fairly static and complex queries are less frequent. Also, most databases store all data on disks (except for in-memory databases) and are therefore optimized for disk access.

To retrieve data from a database an application must issue a query. If an application need the data 10 times per second it must fire the query 10 times per second. This does not scale well to hundreds or thousands of queries per second.

Database triggers can be used to fire in response to database update events. However database triggers tend to be slow and often cannot easily perform complex condition checking and implement logic to react.

In-memory databases may be better suited to CEP applications than traditional relational database as they generally have good query performance. Yet they are not optimized to provide immediate, real-time query results required for CEP and event stream analysis.

1.3. The Esper engine for CEP

The Esper engine works a bit like a database turned upside-down. Instead of storing the data and running queries against stored data, the Esper engine allows applications to store queries and run the data through. Response from the Esper engine is real-time when conditions occur that match queries. The execution model is thus continuous rather than only when a query is submitted.

Esper provides two principal methods or mechanisms to process events: event patterns and event stream queries.

Esper offers an event pattern language to specify expression-based event pattern matching. Underlying the pattern matching engine is a state machine implementation. This method of event processing matches expected sequences of presence or absence of events or combinations of events. It includes time-based correlation of events.

Esper also offers event stream queries that address the event stream analysis requirements of CEP applications. Event stream queries provide the windows, aggregation, joining and analysis functions for use with streams of events. These queries are following the EPL syntax. EPL has been designed for similarity with the SQL query language but differs from SQL in its use of views rather than tables. Views represent the different operations needed to structure data in an event stream and to derive data from an event stream.

Esper provides these two methods as alternatives through the same API.

1.4. Required 3rd Party Libraries

Esper requires the following 3rd-party libraries at runtime:

Esper requires the following 3rd-party libraries at compile-time and for running the test suite: