Event Stream Processor Compared to Databases

SAP Sybase Event Stream Processor complements traditional databases to help solve new classes of problems where continuous, event-driven data analysis is required.

Event Stream Processor executes queries continuously on fast moving data streams.

Event Stream Processor is not a replacement for databases. While databases excel at storing and querying static data, and reliably processing transactions, they are not effective at continuously analyzing fast moving streams of data.

Traditional Business Intelligence: On-Demand Queries

• Traditional databases must store all data on disk before beginning to process it.

• Databases do not use preregistered continuous queries. Database queries are "one-time-only" queries. To ask a question ten times a second, you must issue the query ten times a second. This model breaks down when one or more such queries need to be executed continuously, as polling the database faster results in a performance impact to the source systems, and adds latency.

• Databases do not use incremental processing. Event Stream Processor can evaluate queries incrementally as data arrives.

Event Stream Processor (ESP) is not an in-memory database, although it stores all data in memory. Unlike an in-memory database, ESP is optimized for continuous queries, rather than on-demand queries and transaction processing, as shown in the figure.

Continuous Queries in Event Stream Processor