Prof. Zicardi of ODBMS.org (remember ODBMS?[*1]) published an interesting interview with HP Fellow (and past RDBMS architect) Dr Goetz Graefe on the rising importance of “data storage” without the twirling-disks-thing. Of course this is a trend very much in evidence at customers of TIBCO with (“NoSQL”-type, or more accurately, “SQL-optional”) technologies like TIBCO BusinessEvents using distributed DataGrid technology for faster-than-disk / more-scale-than-a-single-process event correlating. And for those  looking to apply “diskless” to SOA as well as EDA, note that TIBCO ActiveSpaces now includes the TIBCO BusinessWorks interface for doing data distribution in BW processes…

With CEP we have long questioned the need to “bung everything onto disk” and instead process it (the incoming events) as they arrive… of course you will want a historic record for some events, but fundamentally you don’t usually want to follow the old-model of “put it in the database then worry about / process it later”. Unless you are an RDBMS sales guy anyway!

Notes:

*1. “Object-oriented” makes perfect sense until one tries too hard on encapsulation (of behavior). For example, a business rule relating new-order events with existing customers could be encapsulated in the order event or the customer event, but in reality should be in neither. Although you might want to be able to refer to related rules from either…