Following on from the news about Microsoft’s CEP engine, Richard Seroter attended yesterday’s TechEd session on the new engine and has blogged verydetailed notes. See http://seroter.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/teched-2009-day-2-session-notes-cep-first-look/. I’m delighted to see that Microsoft is disclosing muchthe same level of information publicallythat they made available internally a couple of months ago.Now all we need is CTP 1.

Richard notes that the session was sparsely attended. CEP has some way to go before it is widely acknowledged or understood in the mainstream, and the potential impact of engines like this will be poorly understood at present. I intend to put together an article or two in which I’ll attempt to explain why I think we should all take note.

I responded to a comment from Tim Bass last night. Tim is a vocal critic of the CEP marketplace, and one of hiscommon themes is the belief that most/all CEP vendors currently attach the term ‘CEP’ incorrectly to what are ‘mere’ event stream processing engines. I responded by pointing out the CEDR technology, on which I believe Microsoft’sengine in based, directly tackles one of the chief characteristics of the event ‘cloud’ (a core concept in CEP) which is that events may be detected out-of-order in terms of time and causality, and that CEP engines must be able to handle this efficiently. I was interested to see that Richard recorded an emphasis on this capability of Microsoft’s new engine.

Also, one other point.I had a Twitter message yesterday from another well-known person on the CEP circuit who said that he hadn’t seen any sign of anyone using the new Microsoft engine yet. For the avoidance of confusion, Microsoft only announced the engine yesterday. There is a very early private preview of the code doing the rounds internally within Microsoft. It looks like the first public CTP will be available later this year and that launch is expected next year. So no one is yet using the engine, apart from Microsoft themselves (apparently, if I understood comments madeduring the keynote correctly,they are currently handling 500 million events a day through the engine in association with their web site).