An Apama query is a self-contained processing element that communicates with other queries, and with its environment, by sending and receiving events. Queries are designed to be multithreaded and to scale across machines.

You use Apama queries to find patterns within, or perform aggregations over, defined sets of events. For each pattern that is found, an associated block of procedural code is executed. Typically this results in one or more events being transmitted to other parts of the system.