Event Processing for Business: Organizing the Real-Time Enterprise [ハードカバー]

David Luckham has published his second book on event processing; His first book "Power of Events" is the first book that opened the current era of event processing, which made which made David Luckham the prophet and elder statesman of the event processing community. My first meeting with David in early 2004 inspired me to think about the future of this area, and gave me some label and framework for what I was doing at that time. Some of David's ideas like event processing networks and event patterns found themselves as part of the area foundations, but evolved with time.

The new book is aimed at being non-technical book, targeted for people in business and IT departments that want to understand what is event processing, and what are its uses. It is serves a similar target to the book by Chandy and Schulte. In comparison the book "Event Processing in Action" co-authored by Peter Niblett and myself is aimed at more technical audience that would like to understand the building blocks of constructing event processing applications.

The book starts with chapter 1, which has the ambitious title "event processing and the survival of the modern enterprise" - explaining what most event processing is - and gives six principles of how it should be used by enterprises. Then it moves in chapter 2 to a history lesson - surveying all ancestors of event processing simulation, networks, active data bases and more, getting to event driven architectures.
Chapter 3 surveys the concepts that Luckham used in his first book, with definitions and some modifications to the original concepts. Chapter 4 is back to a history lesson - this time from the point of view of the commercial world. Here Luckham repeats his evolution classification that he has talked about in the past: simple event processing, creeping CEP, CEP as recognized technology and unseen CEP. According to Luckham we have just moved recently to the third phase (CEP became a recognized IT). The fourth and last phase is unseen (CEP goes behind the scene since it is ubiquitous and exists everywhere), it also becomes holistic, and in fact part of the infrastructure of every system from household automation to national cyber security. Chapter 5 views the markets - existing and emerging - and talking about industries and applications, with 13 examples (seems that the author is not superstitious!). Chapter 6 explains the notion of event patterns, here it goes more to technical details, but stays mainly at the example level, neither trying to define pattern language nor talks about the implementation of patterns in current languages, Chapters 7 and 8 are entitled: "making sense of chaos in real time: part 1 and 2", with some examples and methodological insights. Chapter 9 is the last chapter entitled "the future of event processing" talking about the phases of evolution to the next phase, and some futuristic applications like:solving gridlock in the metropolis. The EPTS glossary is reproduced as appendix.

Overall -- good source of material and insights about event processing especially for the non-technical reader and good summary of the various talks that David has presented in the last decade. A must read for anybody interested in event processing.

This was a disappointing book. If you know a little bit about event processing, you probably won't learn much new. It's not clear who the intended audience is - it's a very high level survey. It's not a hardcore technical book, which is OK, but neither is it an interesting business book with detailed case studies. The examples tend to be pretty shallow and don't do "case study" level of detail on a problem solved by an organization using CEP technology.
The book mixes technical and business examples fairly haphazardly and without a lot of discipline - for example, the author shows a few examples of rules early on to illustrate some business examples, and but they seem to come out of nowhere, because he doesn't into the details of his specific rules grammar.

The author is a relentless cheerleader for CEP systems, but the book doesn't go into detail on any limitations of current vendor systems, or cover any hard problems in certain application domains for which CEP might not be suited, or where using the current-generation systems are a poor fit. In a book like this that aims to convince readers that CEP systems can solve real business problems, it'd be interesting to read a detailed case study of a customer with a natural domain of streaming event data that tried to adopt a commercial CEP system, and what the challenges were. Given that the marketing efforts from CEP vendors seem focused pretty much exclusively on capital markets customers, it'd be intesting in a book like this to have real case studies of implementations of commercial CEP product in some domain outside of trading systems.

Finally, the writing style is very distracting. The author comes across as overexcited and uses exclamation marks to end many sentences on each page, even sometimes several in each paragraph. There are too many exclamation marks! Nobody should use so many superfluous exclamation marks! It's distracting when you try to read the book! Stop using so many exclamation marks! It's very annoying!

His first book The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems was very technical and introduced the concept of event processing. It was a landmark piece, which launched the CEP cateory, with serious investments from IBM, Oracle, Progress, Tibco and Informatica in what Gartner says is a $300M+ annual market.

For years, CEP remained a niche technical discussion with mostly the financial sector adopting the technology for front office trading. What this book does well is creates a connection to the business dialog by reviewing the history of event processing, introducing the topic to line of business executives and detailing dozens of examples of how CEP is applied to a wide swath of organizations.

Luckham does a good job of keeping the stories brief to deliver a broad range of concise cases. Oftentimes the best way to see new opportunities is to examine them from different angles and industries. I found the following examples particularly useful:

Airline baggage handling - 42 million items mishandled or delays in 2007 costing airlines $3.8B. Event processing correlates common bag handling issues to alert of missed loads, traveler transfers and more events that can help to reduce the time between problem identification and resolution.

Targeted Marketing - how a bank uses CEP to correlate transactions to marketing offers and improve up-sell success before customers purchase services and products from a competitor.

Fraudulent Credit Card Use - Identifying patterns of use with stolen credit card before larger losses are experienced.

Logistics cases ranging from truck fleet management to trains - Using geospatial and weather information to more quickly identify future hazards, re-route and save precious time to meet delivery SLAs.

Large City Police Departments - To lower the rate of recidivism, CEP is employed to correlate parolee releases and threat levels to improve neighborhood security (by increasing patrol visits) and proactively identify possible suspects based on proximity of crime and felon addresses.