The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems [Hardcover]

David Luckham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 2002

As global information systems become ever more powerful, complex, and intertwined, companies need new approaches to extracting information, transforming it into intelligence, and acting on it. David Luckham introduces a breakthrough solution that offers compelling benefits at every level and scale of the enterprise: Complex Event Processing (CEP). Luckham first identifies key challenges faced by today's enterprise information systems, and demonstrates the "event-driven" nature of management in the electronic enterprise. He then introduces CEP, showing how it can harness the power of events to automate management without compromising managers' control. Luckham illuminates fundamental concepts such as events, causality, event hierarchies, event patterns, and rules; then shows how these concepts can be used to solve key enterprise management problems. In Part III, he presents a realistic description of what it takes to build CEP applications that scale to real world problems, introducing the new RAPIDE event pattern language. The book concludes with detailed case studies that show Luckham's CEP tools at work in the enterprise.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a defined set of tools and techniques for analyzing and controlling the complex series of interrelated events that drive modern distributed information systems. This emerging technology helps IS and IT professionals understand what is happening within the system, quickly identify and solve problems, and more effectively utilize events for enhanced operation, performance, and security. CEP can be applied to a broad spectrum of information system challenges, including business process automation, schedule and control processes, network monitoring and performance prediction, and intrusion detection.

The Power of Events introduces CEP and shows specifically how this innovative technology can be utilized to enhance the quality of large-scale, distributed enterprise systems. The book describes the challenges faced by today's information systems, explains fundamental CEP concepts, and highlights CEP's role within a complex and evolving contemporary context. After thoroughly introducing the concept, the book moves on to a more detailed, technical explanation of CEP, featuring the Rapide™ event pattern language, reactive event pattern rules, event pattern constraints, and event processing agents. It offers practical advice on building CEP-based solutions that solve real world IS/IT problems.

Readers will learn about such essential topics as:

• Managing the open electronic enterprise in the "global event cloud"
• Process architectures and on-the-fly process evolution
• Events, timing, causality, and aggregation
• Event patterns and event abstraction hierarchies
• Causal event tracking and information gaps
• Multiple views and hierarchical viewing
• Dynamic process architectures
• The Rapide event pattern language
• Event pattern rules, constraints, and agents
• Event processing networks (EPNs)
• Causal models and event pattern maps
• Implementing event abstraction hierarchies

Several comprehensive case studies illustrate the benefits of CEP, as well as key strategies for applying the technology. Examples include the real-time monitoring of events flowing between the business processes of collaborating enterprises, and a hierarchically organized set of event-driven views of a financial trading system. One of the case studies shows how to apply CEP to network viewing and intrusion detection.

The book concludes with a look at building an infrastructure for CEP, showing how the technology can provide a significant competitive advantage amidst the myriad of event-driven, Internet-based applications now coming onto the market.

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About the Author

David Luckham is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, where he directs the Program Analysis and Verification Project. He played a significant role in the founding of Rational Software in 1981, supplying both the Ada compiler from which the company's first products were developed and serving as a member of the initial software development team. Dr. Luckham is an acknowledged leader in high-level, multiprocessing programming languages; annotation languages; and event-based simulation systems for both hardware and software architectures. He has published more than one hundred technical articles, two of them winning ACM/IEEE Best Paper Awards, as well as three books on the design of Specification Languages and their application to software testing and verification, and hardware simulation.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (May 18, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201727897
• ISBN-13: 978-0201727890
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #789,807 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #62 in Books > Computers & Technology > Databases > Database Design

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ground Breaking, Heavyweight, Must-Have, May 20, 2002

By 

Geoff Mendal (Cupertino, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems (Hardcover)

It is seldom that one comes across a software engineering book that is free of hype and doesn't cut corners when it comes to providing details. This book is a must-have for every software professional. You don't have to be working on a cutting edge project to benefit from this book. What this book teaches is a new way of critically thinking about complex software design and architecture. The book is masterfully written and as its Preface states, is the result of over a decade of hard-core research into event pattern matching conducted at Stanford University. This is a book that one can put to use right away, using tools and systems that are available today.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Formal approach to system and business event mgmt, May 11, 2002

By 

Mike Tarrani "www.tarrani.com" (Deltona, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems (Hardcover)

This book applies structured engineering methods to systems and software engineering, making it a unique and much needed addition to the body of knowledge. Prior to this book event processing was in the domain of embedded and realtime systems developers and hardware designers. This book shows how to effectively use these techniques in IT.

The first two chapters give reasons why complex event processing (CEP)is essential to the distributed systems that characterize supply chain, e-commerce and internet-enabled applications. They also sort out the key issues and present a paradigm for a global event cloud that is decomposed in subsequent chapters. Instead of providing an in-depth analysis of each chapter, which would make for a lengthly and boring review I'll give the highlights of what I liked:

- Architecture is an important theme throughout the book. In particular the Rapide architecture description language adds formality and structure. The key elements of Rapide are causal event modeling, event patterns/pattern matching and event pattern maps and constraints.

- Events, timing and causality, and their interrelationships, are thoroughly explained. These are the key to understanding the treatment of patterns, rules and constraints that follow, and for tackling the subsequent discussion of complex events and event hierarchies. This is slow reading, but the essence of the book.

- Event processing networks, which are a practical use of the knowledge imparted by this book. Moreover, the two case studies showed real world application of the concepts instead of abstract theory. They reinforced all of the key points made earlier in the book.

CEP is particularly applicable to enterprise application integration projects that depend on business events and network and systems management instrumentation (especially developers who write Tivoli software adapters, develop network monitoring solutions or similar endeavors).

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly Easy to Read, June 10, 2002

By 

Sunil Bhargava "sunilbhargava" (Hillsborough, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems (Hardcover)

As IT infrastructure weaves itself into every aspect of a business, managing these systems becomes an imperative. The Lines of Business demand complete and the real time visibility into the IT infrastructure. Most systems developed do not allow the IT departments to manage at these levels. Dr Luckhams book propose a framework for managing this complexity. He puts forth, in a simple and readable manner how do manage systems by observing the "Cloud of Events" and how to build systems that are easier to manage.

It is the first book that I have come across that deals with the topic of IT management at a level that is not too abstract or complete focused on existing tools, instead Dr Luckham takes the reader much closer to a solution to the problem by getting them to think about the problem in the right way. He puts years of Stanford research into a readable form for the ordinary mortal. Bravo.