Understanding Aleri - Complex Event Processing - Part II

Aleri, the complex event processing platform from Sybase was reviewed at high level in my last post.

This week, let's review the Aleri Studio, the user interface to Aleri platform and the use of pub/sub api, one of many  ways to interface with the Aleri platform. The studio is an integral part of the platform and comes packaged with the free evaluation copy. If you haven't already done so, please download a copy from here.  The fairly easy installation process of Aleri product gets you up and running in a few minutes.

The aleri studio is an authoring platform for building the model that  defines interactions and sequencing between various data streams. It also can merge multiple streams to form one or more streams. With this eclipse based studio, you can test the models you build by feeding them with the test data and monitor the activity inside the streams in real time. Let's look at the various type of streams you can define in Aleri and their functionality.

Source Stream - Only this type of stream can handle incoming data. The operations that can be performed by the incoming data are insert, update, delete and upsert. Upsert, as the name suggests updates data if the key defining a row is already present in the stream. Else, it inserts a record in the stream.

Aggregate Stream - This stream creates a summary record for each group  defined by specific attribute. This provides functionality equivalent to 'group by' in ANSI SQL.

Copy stream - This stream is created by copying another stream but with a different retention rule.

Compute Stream - This stream allows you to use a function on each row of data to get a new computed element for each row of the data stream.

Extend Stream - This stream is derived from another stream by additional column expressions

Filter Stream - You can define a filter condition for this stream. Just like extend and compute streams, this stream applies filter conditions on other streams to derive a new stream.

Flex Stream - Significant flexibility in handling streaming data is achieved through custom coded methods. Only this stream allows you to write your own methods to meet special needs.

Join Stream - Creates a new stream by joining two or more streams on some condition. Both, Inner and Outer joins can be used  to join streams.

Pattern Stream - Pattern matching rules are applied with this stream

Union Stream - As the name suggests, this joins two or more streams with same row data structure. Unlike the join stream, this stream  includes all the data from all the participating streams.

By using some of these streams and the pub api of Aeri, I will demonstrate the seggregation of twitter live feed into two different streams. The twitter live feed is consumed by a listener from Twitter4j library. If you just want to try Twitter4j library first, please follow my earlier post 'Tracking user sentiments on Twitter'. The data received by the twitter4j listener, is fed to a source stream in our model by using the publication API  from Aleri. In this exercise we will try to separate out tweets based on their content. Built on the example from my previous post,  we will divide the incoming stream into two streams based on the content. One stream will get any tweets that consists 'lol' and the other gets tweets with a smiley ":)" face in the text . First, let's list the tasks we need to perform to make this a working example.

1. Create a model with three streams
2. Validate the model is error free
3. Create a static data file
4. Start the Aleri server and feed the static data file to the stream manually to confirm correct working of the model.
5. Write java code to consume twitter feed. Use the publish API to publish the tweets to Aleri platform.
6. Run the demo and see the live data as it flows through various streams. 

Image 1 - Aleri Studio - the authoring view

This image is a snapshot of the Aleri Studio with the three streams - one on the left named "tweets" is a source stream and two on the right named "lolFilter" and "smileyFilter" are of the filter type. Source stream accepts incoming data while filter streams receive the filtered data. Here is how I defined the filter conditions -

like (tweets.text, '%lol%').

tweets is the name of the stream and text is the field in the stream we are interested in. %lol% means, select any tweets that have 'lol' string in the content. Each stream has only 2 fields - id and text. The id and text maps to id and text-message sent by twitter. Once you define the model, you can check it for any errors by clicking on the check mark in the ribbon at the top. Erros if any will show up in the panel at bottom right of the image. Once your model is error free, it's time to test it.

Image 2 - Aleri Studio - real time monitoring view

The following image shows the test interface of the studio. Try running your model with a static data file first. The small red square at the top indicates that Aleri server is currently running. The console window at the bottom right shows server messages like successful starts and stops etc. The Run-test tab in the left pane, is where you pick a static data file to feed the source stream. The pane on the right shows all the currently running streams and live data processed by the streams.












The image below shows the format of the data file used to test the model
tweets ALERI_OPS="i" id="1" text="324test 1234" ; tweets ALERI_OPS="i" id="2" text="test 12345"; tweets ALERI_OPS="i" id="3" text="test 1234666" ; tweets ALERI_OPS="i" id="4" text="test 1234888" ; tweets ALERI_OPS="i" id="5" text="test 1234999" ;


The next image shows the information flow.

Image 3 - Aleri Publishing - Information flow

The source code for this exercise is at the bottom.
Remember that you need to have twitter4j library in the build path and have Aleri server running before you run the program. Because I have not added any timer to the execution thread, the only way to stop the execution is to abort it. For brevity and to keep the code line short, I have deleted all the exception handling and logging. The code utilizes only the publishing part of the pub/sub api of Aleri.  I will demonstrate the use of sub side of the api in my next blog post.

This blog intends to provide something simple but useful to the developer community.  Feel free to leave your comment and share this article if you like it.

package com.sybase.aleri; import java.io.BufferedWriter; import java.io.File; import java.io.FileWriter; import java.io.IOException; import twitter4j.Status; import twitter4j.StatusDeletionNotice; import twitter4j.StatusListener; import twitter4j.TwitterException; import twitter4j.TwitterStream; import twitter4j.TwitterStreamFactory; import twitter4j.conf.Configuration; import twitter4j.conf.ConfigurationBuilder; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpGatewayConstants; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpObserver; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpPlatform; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpPlatformParms; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpPlatformStatus; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpPublication; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpStream; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpStreamDataRecord; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpStreamDefinition; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpSubscription; import com.aleri.pubsub.SpSubscriptionCommon; import com.aleri.pubsub.impl.SpFactory; import com.aleri.pubsub.impl.SpUtils; import com.aleri.pubsub.test.ClientSpObserver; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Collection; import java.util.Date; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Vector; import java.util.TimeZone; public class TwitterTest_2 { //make sure that Aleri server is running prior to running this program static { //creates the publishing platform createPlatform(); } // Important objects from the publish API static SpStream stream; static SpPlatformStatus platformStatus; static SpPublication pub; public static void main(String[] args) throws TwitterException, IOException { TwitterTest_2 tt2 = new TwitterTest_2(); ConfigurationBuilder cb = new ConfigurationBuilder(); cb.setDebugEnabled(true); //use your twitter id and passcode cb.setUser("Your user name"); cb.setPassword("Your Password"); // creating the twitter4j listener Configuration cfg = cb.build(); TwitterStream twitterStream = new TwitterStreamFactory(cfg) .getInstance(); StatusListener_1 listener; listener = new StatusListener_1(); twitterStream.addListener(listener); //runs the sample that comes with twitter4j twitterStream.sample(); } private static int createPlatform() { int rc = 0; //Aleri platform configuration - better alternative is to your properties file String host = "localhost"; int port = 22000; //aleri configured to run with empty userid and pwd strings String user = ""; String password = ""; //name of the source stream - the one that gets the data from the twitter4j String streamName = "tweets"; String name = "TwitterTest_2"; SpPlatformParms parms = SpFactory.createPlatformParms(host, port, user, password, false, false); platformStatus = SpFactory.createPlatformStatus(); SpPlatform sp = SpFactory.createPlatform(parms, platformStatus); stream = sp.getStream(streamName); pub = sp.createPublication(name, platformStatus); // Then get the stream definition containing the schema information. SpStreamDefinition sdef = stream.getDefinition(); /* int numFieldsInRecord = sdef.getNumColumns(); Vector colTypes = sdef.getColumnTypes(); Vector colNames = sdef.getColumnNames(); */ return 0; } static SpStream getStream() { return stream; } static SpPlatformStatus getPlatformStatus() { return platformStatus; } static SpPublication getPublication() { return pub; } static int publish(SpStream stream, SpPlatformStatus platformStatus, SpPublication pub, Collection fieldData) { int rc = 0; int i = pub.start(); SpStreamDataRecord sdr = SpFactory.createStreamDataRecord(stream, fieldData, SpGatewayConstants.SO_UPSERT, SpGatewayConstants.SF_NULLFLAG, platformStatus); Collection dataSet = new Vector(); dataSet.add(sdr); System.out .println("\nAttempting to publish the data set to the Platform for stream <" + stream.getName() + ">."); rc = pub.publishTransaction(dataSet, SpGatewayConstants.SO_UPSERT, SpGatewayConstants.SF_NULLFLAG, 1); // commit blocks the thread until data is consumed by the platform System.out.println("before commit() call to the Platform."); rc = pub.commit(); return 0; } }