Event Stream Processor Compared to Databases

ESP complements traditional databases to help solve new classes of problems where continuous, event-driven data analysis is required.

ESP provides active monitoring of event streams, with the ability to generate immediate alerts, notifications or responses when something happens.

ESP is not a replacement for databases. While databases excel at storing and querying static data, and reliably processing transactions, ESP excels at continuously analyzing fast moving streams of data.

ESP is not an in-memory database, although it stores all data in memory. ESP is optimized for continuous queries, rather than on-demand queries and transaction processing, as shown in the figure.

Figure 1: Continuous Queries in SAP Event Stream Processor