Consistent Streaming Through Time: A Vision for Event Stream Processing

Abstract: Event processing will play an increasingly important role in constructing enterprise applications that can immediately react to business critical events. Various technologies have been proposed in recent years, such as event processing, data streams and asynchronous messaging (e.g. pub/sub). We believe these technologies share a common processing model and differ only in target workload, including query language features and consistency requirements. We argue that integrating these technologies is the next step in a natural progression. In this paper, we present an overview and discuss the foundations of CEDR, an event streaming system that embraces a temporal stream model to unify and further enrich query language features, handle imperfections in event delivery and define correctness guarantees. We describe specific contributions made so far and outline next steps in developing the CEDR system.