In StreamInsight, the time that comes with events has to be monotonic, i.e. it cannot go back. More precisely, at the moment a CTI (Current Time Increment) event with certain time is stored into a stream, your application has committed to this point in time, and cannot store any events into the stream that have time that precedes the last CTI time. And, you must generate the CTI events, because before committing to certain time (by storing a CTI), StreamInsight cannot perform processing on the incoming stream events, because it does not know for sure that they represent the entirety of the information to be processed.

The time presents a challenge in many StreamInsight applications, and the combination of StreamInsight and OPC brings some additional points to consider. We try to present a summary of them below.