14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has opened up access to SQL Server StreamInsight, offering a new release for customers interested to test drive the technology. Essentially, SQL Server StreamInsight is now free for all, having been made available for download to the public. Designed as the Redmond company’s new Complex Event Processing technology, SQL Server StreamInsight is set up to allow business users to derive deeper insights into information stored in their databases, streamlining the correlating of event streams from multiple sources and processing large volumes of data, while promising near-zero latency. Testers can now grab SQL Server StreamInsight Community Technology Preview 2 via the Microsoft Download Center.
The Redmond company explained that the technology was born out of the “necessity to have a rich model for expressing queries and an implementation of that query model that will facilitate incremental computation to incorporate newly arriving events into the query results with minimal latency. Both of these are key characteristics to fulfill the needs of the rich applications that address the business needs,” revealed a member of the StreamInsight Team. “In conjunction with the database research team we worked on extending the relational algebra to incorporate the extensions needed for processing event streams and developed an efficient implementation for it.”
Microsoft is integrating SQL Server StreamInsight into the next iteration of its data platform. In this regard, the Redmond company notes that SQL Server 2008 R2 August Community Technology Preview (CTP) contains SQL Server StreamInsight August CTP. This is the software giant’s way of providing SQL Server 2008 R2 customers with a low-latency complex event processing (CEP) platform.
“As a component of service oriented architectures (SOA), SQL Server StreamInsight analyzes streams of event data and helps respond to patterns in these event streams. StreamInsight can combine with SOA platforms such as BizTalk Server to listen to and track events from multiple data sources. The patterns detected by StreamInsight then can be analyzed and used to make better business decisions,” a member of the Microsoft Data Platform team explained.
A critical aspect that needs to be underlined is that SQL Server StreamInsight is still in the early stages of development. The company indicates that, while some components offered with the Community Technology Preview have reached Alpha development, others are nothing more than internal production employment. At the same time, the company recognized the need to start harvesting feedback from consumers, and in this regard produced the CTP2 release.
“SQL Server StreamInsight allows organizations to process continuous high volume streams of data with low latency in milliseconds. What differentiates our platform even more is the ability for customization; customers and partners can use their own proprietary algorithms to build custom applications, ISVs can build industry specific solutions and embedded system developers can offer low latency processing,” the Microsoft Data Platform representative added.
Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight CTP2 is available for download here. SQL Server 2008 R2 August 2009 CTP is available for download here.