Chapter 59. Real-time BI with StreamInsight
In this chapter, we’re going to look at a product that was new to the SQL Server suite in 2008 R2. That product is StreamInsight, Microsoft’s first iteration of a complex event processing (CEP) engine. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard this term; by the end of the chapter, everything will become clear, and you’ll be thinking about ways to use it in your business. This chapter begins by introducing the architecture of StreamInsight and showing how it might be used. Following this introduction, the focus of the chapter is on the heavy lifting of the analytics: the querying of the streams. Being able to write your CEP applications in languages such as C# and leverage existing developer potential means that building an application and processing events can be achieved quickly. Later in this chapter, we’ll further explore what a developer needs to know to build a successful and flexible StreamInsight application.
We’ll start with some basics before moving on to some quite powerful design patterns and windowing of data.
