I have gotten some questions lately about some ways to enable the identification of alerts and send corresponding notifications to users and systems.  One of the issues complicating the challenge is the need to identify simple events in a single system but to also complex events that are identified based on data from multiple systems.  Another request is to be able to define these events as mathmatical and/or logical equations. 

A new component of Sql Server 2008 R2 called StreamInsight can help fill this need.  Below is a diagram showing the architecture of StreamInsight.  

Some of the highlights of StreamInsight are:

• Ability to have hundreds of thousands of datapoints each second.\
• Ability to define events using the mathmatical function based language F#
• Adapter based framework making it easy to connect to Event sources and Targets

StreamInsight and Complex Event Processing is also a big component of the Microsoft Oil and Gas Reference Architecture.   I see this technology as the glue that will start powering a Digital Oilfield environment where users can spend less time identifying issues in the field along and more time optimizing production.  Over the next few weeks, I am going to try and show you some examples of this architecture in action.  Stay tuned!

Chris Van Dyke

cvandyke@microsoft.com