StreamBase’s Stonebraker touts streaming apps

Mike Stonebraker has had a well-traveled career in IT, specifically in the area of data management. He was the main architect of the Ingres relational database, the Postgres object-relational database, and the Mariposa federated data system. He was founder and CTO of the Ingres, Illustra, and Cohera corporations as well as CTO at Informix and Required Technology. His latest project is StreamBase Systems, where he is founder and CTO. StreamBase is attempting to ride what it believes will be a great wave of need for high-speed streams-based data applications. Stonebraker recently met with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill in Pacific Grove, Calif., to discuss StreamBase and recent goings-on with Stonebraker's previous projects. Stonebraker also provided his views on the open source phenomenon and Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft.

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InfoWorld: What are StreamBase's goals?

Stonebraker: This is a commercialization of an academic prototype and Stan Zdonik, who's [professor of computer science] at Brown University, and I four years ago basically recognized it. If you want to do real-time stream processing such as Wall Street does bunches of, they're badly served by all [current] system software. So we set about building a new piece of system software from the ground up that's very good at inhaling fire hoses of incoming data and doing fairly complicated processing on it.

InfoWorld: You say it's system software. If it's not analogous to a database, what would it be analogous to?

Stonebraker: When I say system software I mean things like database systems, application servers, messaging systems. There are big differences between what a database system does and what we do. For instance, electronic trading is driving up the feed data rates on all the exchanges because the electronic trading systems are very good at probing the market. So data rates are exploding on Wall Street, trades are going up, and electronic trading says "Do it right now." And right now means millisecond response time, inhaling fire hoses of data. We have an engine that's good at this. We're [currently] selling most exclusively in financial services. We're a startup. We're a 25-person company. We're very well-funded. The financial services [industry] is willing to take risks on startups. They're willing to deal with new technology. Other places where there are big applications [for StreamBase] are in military and homeland security.

InfoWorld: Why those?

Stonebraker: We did a prototype that dealt with army battalion monitoring. When an army battalion is 30,000 humans and 12,000 vehicles, the army is deadly serious about getting a vital signs monitor on every one of the humans so they can do combat medical triage or [take other actions]. They already have a GPS system in every vehicle, but that didn't keep Jennifer Lynch's convoy from getting lost.

They want to turn this into a system to watch the position of every vehicle and compare it against where you're supposed to be. They also want to put a sensor on the gun turret. Together with position, that allows you to detect crossfire which is a big problem in Iraq. [Also,] they want to put a monitor on the gas gauge and figure out do you have enough fuel to accomplish your mission. It's this style of application which is large amounts of real-time data with real-time actions to take.

InfoWorld: StreamBase is not really transactional software, correct?

Stonebraker: No, none of these applications are transactional. This is not a bread-and-butter business data processing model …The military is a good market because they've got fire hoses of real-time data and want to take real-time actions based on it.

[Other opportunities include] industrial process control, monitoring Cheerios factories, and oil refineries; it's a very conservative market and downstream [these are] something we'll look at, but not right now. Any continuous industrial manufacturing process is monitoring what's happening and wanting to take corrective action before you spit out too much bad product and so it's a ton of sensors watching intermediate steps of the process, and you want to take corrective action if those sensors get out of whack. Another [opportunity] is in the networking space, the denial of service attacks, intrusion detection -- people would love to do it in real time so that they can take corrective action quickly.

Another example is in financial services [where] the fear is that the bad guys that do credit card fraud and identity theft will target financial services networks. So financial services companies want to do things like watch every application-level event in a worldwide network [for] the same customer logged in from two or more IP addresses that look like they're more than a mile apart. [We] watch a complicated network for application-level events that have this or that property, the idea being to look for situations that might be fraud. These are applications which are currently typically done by salting away every event in the database and then looking at in batch after close of business. That's like locking the hen house after the fox has already been in there. [Users] want to move that to real time and this is another example of network monitoring.

There's a sea change in micro-sensor technology of various sorts. You've probably heard the most about RFID which [I think is one of the least] interesting technologies. But what's going to happen is that everything of material significance is going to get sensor-tagged by one or another technology in the next decade or so, and it's going to report its state or location in real time and that's going to generate a [great] deal of new monitoring applications.

[Another example is E-ZPass toll road systems.] What's going to happen fairly quickly is that your E-ZPass system is going to position you in real time. That will allow the turnpike authorities to do congestion-based tolling, which is when how much to charge you in toll depends on how many other people are trying to use the same road.