Complex Event Processing - Integrating CEP With Time Series Databases

Integrating CEP With Time Series Databases

A time series database is a software system that is optimized for the handling of data organized by time. Time series are finite or infinite sequences of data items, where each item has an associated timestamp and the sequence of timestamps is non-decreasing. Elements of a time series are often called ticks. The timestamps are not required to be ascending (merely non-decreasing) because in practice the time resolution of some systems such as financial data sources can be quite low (milliseconds, microseconds or even nanoseconds), so consecutive events may carry equal timestamps.

Time series data provides a historical context to the analysis typically associated with complex event processing. This can apply to any vertical industry such as finance and cooperatively with other technologies such as BPM as described elsewhere in this document.

Consider the scenario in finance where there is a need to understand historic price volatility to determine statistical thresholds of future price movements. This is helpful for both trade models and transaction cost analysis.

The ideal case for CEP analysis is to view historical time series and real-time streaming data as a single time continuum. What happened yesterday, last week or last month is simply as extension of what is occurring today and what may occur in the future. An example may involve comparing current market volumes to historic volumes, prices and volatility for trade execution logic. Or the need to act upon live market prices may involve comparisons to benchmarks that include sector and index movements, whose intra-day and historic trends gauge volatility and smooth outliers.