TIBCO Streaming

TIBCO Streaming is a platform for building real-time streaming analytics applications. It analyzes live data from sources such as market data feeds, message buses, and sensors, applies logic to it as it arrives, and publishes the results as queryable live tables and alerts. It bundles an event processing server, a development environment, a live data server, and connectors to data sources and sinks.

Audience

Developers who build event processing and live data applications, client developers who consume the results, and administrators who run the nodes and clusters. The vendor's adapter set is aimed at capital markets, and the documentation also describes IoT streaming data.

Key Capabilities

• StreamBase Server: Runs streaming data analysis applications written in the EventFlow language.
• StreamBase Studio: An Eclipse-based development environment with a drag-and-drop interface for EventFlow, a forms-based editor for LiveView, and a graphical step-through debugger. EventFlow operators documented in the release notes include Union, Split, Decision Table, a JPMML model evaluator, and Python operators.
• LiveView Server: A StreamBase application that configures incoming streaming data into published tables. Clients query them with LiveQL, and a REST API queries tables, manages alerts, and publishes to them. LiveView Web is a browser package for building visualizations of the data.
• Adapters: Embedded in the server and grouped as standard, premium, and FIX. Documented examples include CSV, WebSocket, HTTP, and SNMP adapters, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, Kinesis, MQTT, RabbitMQ, JMS, OPC UA, and OSIsoft PI, along with market data sources such as CME, Bloomberg, and Thomson Reuters. A separately licensed FIX engine is available.
• Client APIs: Java and .NET APIs for StreamBase and LiveView, plus a LiveView Python client, a JavaScript client, and a REST API. Custom adapters, functions, and operators are written in Java.
• Deployment and operations: A node, fragment, and application model managed with the epadmin command, with single-node and multi-node clusters, a distributed transactional memory API, and high-availability configurations that include quorum detection and recovery. Studio can generate Docker and Kubernetes or Helm projects.
• Spotfire integration: An add-on licensed for serving live data to Spotfire clients.
• Data Streams for Cloud: A separately installable web service for creating LiveView tables from a browser in private, public, or hybrid clouds.
• Model Management Server: Added in version 11.2.0 for managing models and decision tables in clusters, currently available for preview only.
• Latency: The vendor describes the platform as low latency. I found no figures in the pages I read.

Technical Specifications

• Current release: 11.2.1 per the documentation home. Version 11.2.0 requires Java 22, which Studio bundles, and adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and Debian 12 support.
• Removed in 11.2.0: StreamSQL, the H2 database, C++ client APIs, and several command-line tools. Rolling upgrade from version 10.x to 11.x is unsupported.
• Licensing: TIBCO Enterprise Streaming covers the product with its standard and premium adapters, FIX adapters, LiveView Web Standard Edition, and an Excel add-in, and a separate license covers the FIX engine. A legacy StreamBase license is not upgraded automatically. License activation through TIBCO Activation Service is required from version 11.2.0.
• Pricing: I found none.

Name Change and Lineage: Formerly Spotfire Streaming and TIBCO StreamBase

The 11.2.0 release notes state that Spotfire Streaming is now TIBCO Streaming, with no effect on licenses, support, or existing functionality. The product line descends from StreamBase, a complex event processing product that TIBCO acquired in 2013 when it bought StreamBase Systems, a company founded in 2003 at MIT. The documentation still uses the TIBCO StreamBase name for components such as the Server, Studio, and the EventFlow language. TIBCO is now a business unit of Cloud Software Group, whose copyright appears on the documentation. Documentation, listings, and reviews under the names StreamBase, TIBCO StreamBase, and Spotfire Streaming describe earlier versions of this product.