Chapter 11. Today’s event processing challenges
Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them. Just find a different way to stand.
Oprah Winfrey
Up to this point we have focused on what might be called state-of-the-art event processing practices. Event processing applications are being developed successfully using the patterns and approaches that we have discussed, but application developers should be aware that there are some challenging topics that are not fully resolved within the current state of the practice. These topics might not have any bearing on your particular application, but you should consider their implications to see if they raise any issues that you need to avoid. The purpose of this chapter is to inform you of these challenges. The chapter covers the following topics:
- The temporal semantics of event processing
- Inexact event processing
- Event retraction and event causality