StreamBase catchup
While I was cryptic in my general CEP/streaming catchup, I’ll say a bit more regarding StreamBase in particular. At the highest level, non-technically:
- StreamBase once planned to conquer the world.
- However, StreamBase really only sold effectively in the financial trading and intelligence markets.
- StreamBase retrenched, focusing almost exclusively on the financial trading market.
- With StreamBase LiveView, StreamBase is expanding from embedded operational analytics to do (also operational) business intelligence as well.
- StreamBase is hopeful that, perhaps starting with Version 2 or so, LiveView will be successful outside the financial trading market.
Not coincidental to these shifts in focus, StreamBase was our client, then stopped being one for a while, and now is a client again.
StreamBase (the product set) consists primarily of three things (LiveView aside):
- A development environment, whose output is in …
- … a visual programming language called EventFlow …
- … which is complied and executed by StreamBase’s execution layers.
One important set of ancillary products are StreamBase’s connectors to various data sources — StreamBase offers about 125 of its own, a number that approaches 200 when community contributions are included.
StreamBase has a second programming language called StreamSQL, but that’s rarely used except for embedding in or connecting to third-party software. EventFlow and StreamSQL compile to nearly identical byte code. (The main difference seems to be that as a practical matter you’ll name things a bit differently in the two languages, focusing on verbs in EventFlow and nouns in StreamSQL.)
StreamBase says that in the financial trading market, great performance out of the box equates to better time-to-value, since you are spared time you’d otherwise have to spend tuning the system. Implicit in that is a claim — which competitors might dispute 🙂 — that StreamBase has great performance. StreamBase fondly thinks that having a domain-specific language gives it a leg up in achieving great compiler optimization. (The same would presumably apply to StreamBase’s competitors, but only if they have optimizing compilers themselves.)
One point that’s a little unusual for me these days is that StreamBase favors big SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing) boxes over blade-based scale-out. 16+ cores and 256 gigabytes of RAM are not uncommon. Clusters commonly include 4-8 machines, but rarely more; the largest StreamBase cluster evidently contains 36 machines.
And with that I’ll turn to StreamBase’s newest offering, LiveView.
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