Coolest Thing From OpenWorld 09 So Far: Oracle CEP 11g

I've been most interested so far this year by Oracle Complex Event Processing (CEP). This is a product that came over from the BEA acquisition. I'd seen some of it in the past, but everything I've seen so far this year is very impressive.

CEP is a pure-java OSGi container capable of processing a million events per second on commodity hardware. The events can come in from a variety of sources and get processed by something called CQL which is a SQL like language for detecting patterns in events.

The possibilities are unending when you consider all of the devices capable of generating events: GPS devices, cell phones, RFID, temperature sensors, smart meters, etc.