viernes, 13 de marzo de 2015

A First Glance at Oracle Stream Explorer 12c

The brand new Oracle Stream Explorer 12c has been released today. The idea behind this product, which gives it a lot of relevance, is to bring simplicity, usability and enterprise readiness to Event Processing.

We have talked before about Industrial SOA, and the impact that such concepts as: IoT, Social Media, Mobile, Fast Data bring to the table. With this in mind, we have to acknowledge that enterprises nowadays, constantly find themselves dealing with huge, endless amounts of data in motion.

Oracle's pitch in this sense, with Oracle SX, is to put this Real Time Streaming Intelligence in the hands of Business Users and Integrators, who can instantly determine the business value of the information and its relevance as business opportunities and threats.

So let's take a look at the product istself:


As you can see, Oracle SX looks really cool!!, and the first thing we must say in this regard, is that the product's user interface has been entirely built using Alta UI. Hence we are practically guaranteed a very favorable user experience which is not only nice, but will also help us position the tool in our clients.

Functionality-wise, SX abstracts event processing capabilities to a degree in which the user requires no knowledge whatsoever of Real Time Event Driven Architectures, Continuous Query Language (CQL), Java Event Server or the semantics of Event Stream Processing Application Models.

Basically, Stream Explorer introduces three main concepts that we must understand in order to configure the scenarios we want:

  • Exploration: An application that correlates events from streams, data from data sources, even other Explorations. It uses filters, groupings, summaries, ranges, and more to Identify, Qualify and Expose a Real Time Business Solution.
  • Stream: An incoming flow of events that you want to analyze, for example a stream of JMS, EDN events, or simulated Business events from a CSV file.
  • Reference: A connection to static data that is joined to your stream to enrich it and/or to be used in business logic and output.



So, in order to work with my data on Stream Explorer, I would start by creating Streams and References, after which I would assemble specific Explorations based on my information and visualization requirements. Once I begin publishing my explorations, the data will start flowing in real-time:




As you can see in the image above, we can tag our components for ease of discovery, and we can also customize some graphs, summaries and filters.

Some of the main features of Oracle SX include the following:
  • Dynamic uploading of CSV files, JMS, EDN, HTTP Publish and Subscribe and REST are all supported.
  • Reusable Business Solution Patterns are available for users to select a familiar solution analysis and simply apply the relevant Stream.
  • Drafting and Publishing of Explorations enables rapid prototyping of solutions.
  • Exploration chaining, which provides a very simplistic approach to complex solution
    solving, by enabling a streaming flow of resultant live output data between different distinct artifacts.
  • The export feature provides a mechanism to pass any Exploration, through a created jar file, for use in Oracle JDeveloper.
  • The product is Both On-Premise and Cloud enabled, keeping the same UI. It can also be deployed as standalone integrated in the SOA stack or lightweight on Embedded Java.
In conclusion, Oracle SX seems to be a revolutionary offering, very easy to use and attractive enough for customers so it can generate immediate interest. It also spans several use cases and industries, and the ease of deployment and configuration would make it very quick and simple to for example deliver a very good-looking PoC.

I will surely be playing a little more with it and post my findings and opinions, so if you're interested keep tuned!!

Thank you very much for your kind attention, comments and questions are welcome as always.






1 comentario:

  1. Hello Arturo,

    Have you tried creating a CSV based Stream that contains a Timestamp field? I'm receiving an error but I can't find what is happening.

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