There is increasing demand for complex event processing of ever-expanding volumes of data in an ever-growing number of application domains. Traditional complex event processing technologies, based upon either stream database management systems or publish/subscribe systems, are adept at handling many of these applications. However, a growing number of hybrid complex event detection scenarios require features of both technologies. This paper describes a unification of publish/subscribe and stream database concepts to tackle all complex event processing scenarios, with particular emphasis upon hybrid scenarios. The paper describes the architecture for this unified system, the automaton programming language that it supports, and the run-time system that animates automata. Several examples of automata that exploit the system’s unified nature are discussed. Raw automata performance is characterised, and its relative performance against Cayuga with respect to stock trend analysis is presented.