On Alex Buchmann's 60th birthday book

 Alex Buchmann is an old friend, we first met when both of us were 20 years younger, and worked on active databases.  Alex is a little bit older than me, and recently celebrated his 60th birthday.  I could not travel to the ceremony in Darmstadt, but as a gift, contributed to the book, which includes a collection of papers edited by Alex's students (or ex-students).  Today the mail has brought me a copy of this book, with personal inscription from Alex.  The book is called "From Active Data Management to Event-Based Systems and More".   

More detailed about the book can be obtained in the Springer LNCS site.    The book includes a paper entitled "Spatial perspectives of event processing" co-authored with Nir Zolotorevsky.   Browsing the book I see that I am in a very good company, some of the other authors are: Jean Bacon and Ken Moody, Mani Chandy, Umesh Dayal, Tamer Ozsu,  Gerhard Weikum, and many others. 


When I summarized the year 2009 in this Blog, I have written that the quote of the year is taken from Alex's keynote address in DEBS 2009, stating is using regular database techniques for event-based systems is like trying to drink the water in a waterfall using a straw.    Alex also does not like the term "event processing", claiming that "processing" sounds like "data processing" which is an archaic term, and prefers to talk about event-based systems, as shown in the title of the book.


I wish Alex many more years of  good health, fruitful work and fun.