Shared Arrangements: practical inter-query sharing for streaming dataflows

Current systems for data-parallel, incremental processing and view maintenance over high-rate streams isolate the execution of independent queries. This creates unwanted redundancy and overhead in the presence of concurrent incrementally maintained queries: each query must independently maintain the same indexed state over the same input streams, and new queries must build this state from scratch before they can begin to emit their first results. This paper introduces shared arrangements: indexed views of maintained state that allow concurrent queries to reuse the same in-memory state without compromising data-parallel performance and scaling. We implement shared arrangements in a modern stream processor and show order-of-magnitude improvements in query response time and resource consumption for interactive queries against high-throughput streams, while also significantly improving performance in other domains including business analytics, graph processing, and program analysis

A Survey on the Evolution of Stream Processing Systems

Stream processing has been an active research field for more than 20 years, but it is now witnessing its prime time due to recent successful efforts by the research community and numerous worldwide open-source communities. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental aspects of stream processing systems and their evolution in the functional areas of out-of-order data management, state management, fault tolerance, high availability, load management, elasticity, and reconfiguration. We review noteworthy past research findings, outline the similarities and differences between early ('00-'10) and modern ('11-'18) streaming systems, and discuss recent trends and open problems.Comment: 34 pages, 15 figures, 5 table

The Family of MapReduce and Large Scale Data Processing Systems

In the last two decades, the continuous increase of computational power has produced an overwhelming flow of data which has called for a paradigm shift in the computing architecture and large scale data processing mechanisms. MapReduce is a simple and powerful programming model that enables easy development of scalable parallel applications to process vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity machines. It isolates the application from the details of running a distributed program such as issues on data distribution, scheduling and fault tolerance. However, the original implementation of the MapReduce framework had some limitations that have been tackled by many research efforts in several followup works after its introduction. This article provides a comprehensive survey for a family of approaches and mechanisms of large scale data processing mechanisms that have been implemented based on the original idea of the MapReduce framework and are currently gaining a lot of momentum in both research and industrial communities. We also cover a set of introduced systems that have been implemented to provide declarative programming interfaces on top of the MapReduce framework. In addition, we review several large scale data processing systems that resemble some of the ideas of the MapReduce framework for different purposes and application scenarios. Finally, we discuss some of the future research directions for implementing the next generation of MapReduce-like solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1105.4252 by other author

A PROCRUSTEAN APPROACH TO STREAM PROCESSING

The increasing demand for real-time data processing and the constantly growing data volume have contributed to the rapid evolution of Stream Processing Engines (SPEs), which are designed to continuously process data as it arrives. Low operational cost and timely delivery of results are both objectives of paramount importance for SPEs. Given the volatile and uncharted nature of data streams, achieving the aforementioned goals under fixed resources is a challenge. This calls for adaptable SPEs, which can react to fluctuations in processing demands. In the past, three techniques have been developed for improving an SPE’s ability to adapt. Those techniques are classified based on applications’ requirements on exact or approximate results: stream partitioning, and re-partitioning target exact, and load shedding targets approximate processing. Stream partitioning strives to balance load among processors, and previous techniques neglected hidden costs of distributed execution. Load Shedding lowers the accuracy of results by dropping part of the input, and previous techniques did not cope with evolving streams. Stream re-partitioning is used to reconfigure execution while processing takes place, and previous techniques did not fully utilize window semantics. In this dissertation, we put stream processing in a procrustean bed, in terms of the manner and the degree that processing takes place. To this end, we present new approaches, for window-based aggregate operators, which are applicable to both exact and approximate stream processing in modern SPEs. Our stream partitioning, re-partitioning, and load shedding solutions offer improvements in performance and accuracy on real-world data by exploiting the semantics of both data and operations. In addition, we present SPEAr, the design of an SPE that accelerates processing by delivering approximate results with accuracy guarantees and avoiding unnecessary load. Finally, we contribute a hybrid technique, ShedPart, which can further improve load balance and performance of an SPE

Materialisierte views in verteilten key-value stores

Distributed key-value stores have become the solution of choice for warehousing large volumes of data. However, their architecture is not suitable for real-time analytics. To achieve the required velocity, materialized views can be used to provide summarized data for fast access. The main challenge then, is the incremental, consistent maintenance of views at large scale. Thus, we introduce our View Maintenance System (VMS) to maintain SQL queries in a data-intensive real-time scenario.Verteilte key-value stores sind ein Typ moderner Datenbanken um große Mengen an Daten zu verarbeiten. Trotzdem erlaubt ihre Architektur keine analytischen Abfragen in Echtzeit. Materialisierte Views können diesen Nachteil ausgleichen, indem sie schnellen Zuriff auf Ergebnisse ermöglichen. Die Herausforderung ist dann, das inkrementelle und konsistente Aktualisieren der Views. Daher präsentieren wir unser View Maintenance System (VMS), das datenintensive SQL Abfragen in Echtzeit berechnet

Approximate Data Analytics Systems

Today, most modern online services make use of big data analytics systems to extract useful information from the raw digital data. The data normally arrives as a continuous data stream at a high speed and in huge volumes. The cost of handling this massive data can be significant. Providing interactive latency in processing the data is often impractical due to the fact that the data is growing exponentially and even faster than Moore’s law predictions. To overcome this problem, approximate computing has recently emerged as a promising solution. Approximate computing is based on the observation that many modern applications are amenable to an approximate, rather than the exact output. Unlike traditional computing, approximate computing tolerates lower accuracy to achieve lower latency by computing over a partial subset instead of the entire input data. Unfortunately, the advancements in approximate computing are primarily geared towards batch analytics and cannot provide low-latency guarantees in the context of stream processing, where new data continuously arrives as an unbounded stream. In this thesis, we design and implement approximate computing techniques for processing and interacting with high-speed and large-scale stream data to achieve low latency and efficient utilization of resources. To achieve these goals, we have designed and built the following approximate data analytics systems: • StreamApprox—a data stream analytics system for approximate computing. This system supports approximate computing for low-latency stream analytics in a transparent way and has an ability to adapt to rapid fluctuations of input data streams. In this system, we designed an online adaptive stratified reservoir sampling algorithm to produce approximate output with bounded error. • IncApprox—a data analytics system for incremental approximate computing. This system adopts approximate and incremental computing in stream processing to achieve high-throughput and low-latency with efficient resource utilization. In this system, we designed an online stratified sampling algorithm that uses self-adjusting computation to produce an incrementally updated approximate output with bounded error. • PrivApprox—a data stream analytics system for privacy-preserving and approximate computing. This system supports high utility and low-latency data analytics and preserves user’s privacy at the same time. The system is based on the combination of privacy-preserving data analytics and approximate computing. • ApproxJoin—an approximate distributed joins system. This system improves the performance of joins — critical but expensive operations in big data systems. In this system, we employed a sketching technique (Bloom filter) to avoid shuffling non-joinable data items through the network as well as proposed a novel sampling mechanism that executes during the join to obtain an unbiased representative sample of the join output. Our evaluation based on micro-benchmarks and real world case studies shows that these systems can achieve significant performance speedup compared to state-of-the-art systems by tolerating negligible accuracy loss of the analytics output. In addition, our systems allow users to systematically make a trade-off between accuracy and throughput/latency and require no/minor modifications to the existing applications

Performance Optimizations and Operator Semantics for Streaming Data Flow Programs

Unternehmen sammeln mehr Daten als je zuvor und müssen auf diese Informationen zeitnah reagieren. Relationale Datenbanken eignen sich nicht für die latenzfreie Verarbeitung dieser oft unstrukturierten Daten. Um diesen Anforderungen zu begegnen, haben sich in der Datenbankforschung seit dem Anfang der 2000er Jahre zwei neue Forschungsrichtungen etabliert: skalierbare Verarbeitung unstrukturierter Daten und latenzfreie Datenstromverarbeitung. Skalierbare Verarbeitung unstrukturierter Daten, auch bekannt unter dem Begriff "Big Data"-Verarbeitung, hat in der Industrie schnell Einzug erhalten. Gleichzeitig wurden in der Forschung Systeme zur latenzfreien Datenstromverarbeitung entwickelt, die auf eine verteilte Architektur, Skalierbarkeit und datenparallele Verarbeitung setzen. Obwohl diese Systeme in der Industrie vermehrt zum Einsatz kommen, gibt es immer noch große Herausforderungen im praktischen Einsatz. Diese Dissertation verfolgt zwei Hauptziele: Zuerst wird das Laufzeitverhalten von hochskalierbaren datenparallelen Datenstromverarbeitungssystemen untersucht. Im zweiten Hauptteil wird das "Dual Streaming Model" eingeführt, das eine Semantik zur gleichzeitigen Verarbeitung von Datenströmen und Tabellen beschreibt. Das Ziel unserer Untersuchung ist ein besseres Verständnis über das Laufzeitverhalten dieser Systeme zu erhalten und dieses Wissen zu nutzen um Anfragen automatisch ausreichende Rechenkapazität zuzuweisen. Dazu werden ein Kostenmodell und darauf aufbauende Optimierungsalgorithmen für Datenstromanfragen eingeführt, die Datengruppierung und Datenparallelität einbeziehen. Das vorgestellte Datenstromverarbeitungsmodell beschreibt das Ergebnis eines Operators als kontinuierlichen Strom von Veränderugen auf einer Ergebnistabelle. Dabei behandelt unser Modell die Diskrepanz der physikalischen und logischen Ordnung von Datenelementen inhärent und erreicht damit eine deterministische Semantik und eine minimale Verarbeitungslatenz.Modern companies are able to collect more data and require insights from it faster than ever before. Relational databases do not meet the requirements for processing the often unstructured data sets with reasonable performance. The database research community started to address these trends in the early 2000s. Two new research directions have attracted major interest since: large-scale non-relational data processing as well as low-latency data stream processing. Large-scale non-relational data processing, commonly known as "Big Data" processing, was quickly adopted in the industry. In parallel, low latency data stream processing was mainly driven by the research community developing new systems that embrace a distributed architecture, scalability, and exploits data parallelism. While these systems have gained more and more attention in the industry, there are still major challenges to operate them at large scale. The goal of this dissertation is two-fold: First, to investigate runtime characteristics of large scale data-parallel distributed streaming systems. And second, to propose the "Dual Streaming Model" to express semantics of continuous queries over data streams and tables. Our goal is to improve the understanding of system and query runtime behavior with the aim to provision queries automatically. We introduce a cost model for streaming data flow programs taking into account the two techniques of record batching and data parallelization. Additionally, we introduce optimization algorithms that leverage our model for cost-based query provisioning. The proposed Dual Streaming Model expresses the result of a streaming operator as a stream of successive updates to a result table, inducing a duality between streams and tables. Our model handles the inconsistency of the logical and the physical order of records within a data stream natively, which allows for deterministic semantics as well as low latency query execution

Handling Tradeoffs between Performance and Query-Result Quality in Data Stream Processing

Data streams in the form of potentially unbounded sequences of tuples arise naturally in a large variety of domains including finance markets, sensor networks, social media, and network traffic management. The increasing number of applications that require processing data streams with high throughput and low latency have promoted the development of data stream processing systems (DSPS). A DSPS processes data streams with continuous queries, which are issued once and return query results to users continuously as new tuples arrive. For stream-based applications, both the query-execution performance (in terms of, e.g., throughput and end-to-end latency) and the quality of produced query results (in terms of, e.g., accuracy and completeness) are important. However, a DSPS often needs to make tradeoffs between these two requirements, either because of the data imperfection within the streams, or because of the limited computation capacity of the DSPS itself. Performance versus result-quality tradeoffs caused by data imperfection are inevitable, because the quality of the incoming data is beyond the control of a DSPS, whereas tradeoffs caused by system limitations can be alleviated—even erased—by enhancing the DSPS itself. This dissertation seeks to advance the state of the art on handling the performance versus result-quality tradeoffs in data stream processing caused by the above two aspects of reasons. For tradeoffs caused by data imperfection, this dissertation focuses on the typical data-imperfection problem of stream disorder and proposes the concept of quality-driven disorder handling (QDDH). QDDH enables a DSPS to make flexible and user-configurable tradeoffs between the end-to-end latency and the query-result quality when dealing with stream disorder. Moreover, compared to existing disorder handling approaches, QDDH can significantly reduce the end-to-end latency, and at the same time provide users with desired query-result quality. In this dissertation, a generic buffer-based QDDH framework and three instantiations of the generic framework for distinct query types are presented. For tradeoffs caused by system limitations, this dissertation proposes a system-enhancement approach that combines the row-oriented and the column-oriented data layout and processing techniques in data stream processing to improve the throughput. To fully exploit the potential of such hybrid execution of continuous queries, a static, cost-based query optimizer is introduced. The optimizer works at the operator level and takes the unique property of execution plans of continuous queries—feasibility—into account

Fault-tolerance and load management in a distributed stream processing system

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2006.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-199).Advances in monitoring technology (e.g., sensors) and an increased demand for online information processing have given rise to a new class of applications that require continuous, low-latency processing of large-volume data streams. These "stream processing applications" arise in many areas such as sensor-based environment monitoring, financial services, network monitoring, and military applications. Because traditional database management systems are ill-suited for high-volume, low-latency stream processing, new systems, called stream processing engines (SPEs), have been developed. Furthermore, because stream processing applications are inherently distributed, and because distribution can improve performance and scalability, researchers have also proposed and developed distributed SPEs. In this dissertation, we address two challenges faced by a distributed SPE: (1) faulttolerant operation in the face of node failures, network failures, and network partitions, and (2) federated load management. For fault-tolerance, we present a replication-based scheme, called Delay, Process, and Correct (DPC), that masks most node and network failures.(cont.) When network partitions occur, DPC addresses the traditional availability-consistency trade-off by maintaining, when possible, a desired availability specified by the application or user, but eventually also delivering the correct results. While maintaining the desired availability bounds, DPC also strives to minimize the number of inaccurate results that must later be corrected. In contrast to previous proposals for fault tolerance in SPEs, DPC simultaneously supports a variety of applications that differ in their preferred trade-off between availability and consistency. For load management, we present a Bounded-Price Mechanism (BPM) that enables autonomous participants to collaboratively handle their load without individually owning the resources necessary for peak operation. BPM is based on contracts that participants negotiate offline. At runtime, participants move load only to partners with whom they have a contract and pay each other the contracted price. We show that BPM provides incentives that foster participation and leads to good system-wide load distribution. In contrast to earlier proposals based on computational economies, BPM is lightweight, enables participants to develop and exploit preferential relationships, and provides stability and predictability.(cont.) Although motivated by stream processing, BPM is general and can be applied to any federated system. We have implemented both schemes in the Borealis distributed stream processing engine. They will be available with the next release of the system.by Magdalena Balazinska.Ph.D

Complex Event Processing as a Service in Multi-Cloud Environments

The rise of mobile technologies and the Internet of Things, combined with advances in Web technologies, have created a new Big Data world in which the volume and velocity of data generation have achieved an unprecedented scale. As a technology created to process continuous streams of data, Complex Event Processing (CEP) has been often related to Big Data and used as a tool to obtain real-time insights. However, despite this recent surge of interest, the CEP market is still dominated by solutions that are costly and inflexible or too low-level and hard to operate. To address these problems, this research proposes the creation of a CEP system that can be offered as a service and used over the Internet. Such a CEP as a Service (CEPaaS) system would give its users CEP functionalities associated with the advantages of the services model, such as no up-front investment and low maintenance cost. Nevertheless, creating such a service involves challenges that are not addressed by current CEP systems. This research proposes solutions for three open problems that exist in this context. First, to address the problem of understanding and reusing existing CEP management procedures, this research introduces the Attributed Graph Rewriting for Complex Event Processing Management (AGeCEP) formalism as a technology- and language-agnostic representation of queries and their reconfigurations. Second, to address the problem of evaluating CEP query management and processing strategies, this research introduces CEPSim, a simulator of cloud-based CEP systems. Finally, this research also introduces a CEPaaS system based on a multi-cloud architecture, container management systems, and an AGeCEP-based multi-tenant design. To demonstrate its feasibility, AGeCEP was used to design an autonomic manager and a selected set of self-management policies. Moreover, CEPSim was thoroughly evaluated by experiments that showed it can simulate existing systems with accuracy and low execution overhead. Finally, additional experiments validated the CEPaaS system and demonstrated it achieves the goal of offering CEP functionalities as a scalable and fault-tolerant service. In tandem, these results confirm this research significantly advances the CEP state of the art and provides novel tools and methodologies that can be applied to CEP research