As many of you may know, (or not), is that my background is SQL Server. Ever since I started programming, SQL Server has been my “trusty companion”, and my belief is that if you don’t have SQL Server as a backend, then there is something wrong. At work, (Derivco), it is the same thing, and we are jokingly saying that we do not have business logic in the database, we have full-blown applications!
However, both me personally and at work, we do realise the value of streaming data; for real-time processing as well as to distribute data without having to rely on replication. In the ideal world, we would change the applications/systems that are the source of the data to both publish the data as event streams as well as persisting the data to the database. However, it may not be possible to change those applications/systems - at least not in the time frame we would like. So what we want to do is to use the database as the source of the data, but treat the data, not as rows in a database but, as streaming events.
This is the first post in a “mini” series where we look at how we can do what is outlined above. In this post, we look at how to use the SQL Server Extensibility Framework, and more specifically the Java language extension to solve the issue.