It appears that I skipped over a booth at PDC09, because I had no clue what StreamInsight was when I came across the Novermber CTP today. Of course, I downloaded it.

Microsoft® SQL Server® StreamInsight is a platform for the continuous and incremental processing of unending sequences of events (event streams) from multiple sources with near-zero latency. These requirements, shared by vertical markets such as manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities, financial services, health care, web analytics, and IT and data center monitoring, make traditional store and query techniques impractical for timely and relevant processing of data.
StreamInsight allows software developers to create innovative solutions in the domain of Complex Event Processing that satisfy these needs. It allows to monitor, mine, and develop insights from continuous unbounded data streams and correlate constantly changing events with rich payloads in near real time. Industry specific solution developers (ISVs) and developers of custom applications have the opportunity to innovate on and utilize proven, flexible, and familiar Microsoft technology and rely on existing development skills when using the StreamInsight platform.

The description seemed interesting enough, and it definitely seems useful for my company. But most importantly, does it work with twitter? Twitter… Unbounded data stream… that will be a great demo.

After installing the CTP, I looked for demos to describe how to use it. It installed code samples in %programfiles%\Microsoft StreamInsight November CTP\Samples\StreamInsightSamples.zip. Unzip it for a .NET 3.5 solution with samples in C#. There aren’t scripts as in a training kit, but the sample do show off key parts of the libraries (Microsoft.ComplexEventProcessing) they shipped.

If you’re interested in more information, view the sessions on Microsoft Insight from PDC 09. Torsten Grabs presents Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight. Roman Schindlauer and Beysim Sezgin cohost Advanced Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight.