Data management in cloud environments: NoSQL and NewSQL data stores

: Advances in Web technology and the proliferation of mobile devices and sensors connected to the Internet have resulted in immense processing and storage requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a paradigm that promises to meet these requirements. This work focuses on the storage aspect of cloud computing, specifically on data management in cloud environments. Traditional relational databases were designed in a different hardware and software era and are facing challenges in meeting the performance and scale requirements of Big Data. NoSQL and NewSQL data stores present themselves as alternatives that can handle huge volume of data. Because of the large number and diversity of existing NoSQL and NewSQL solutions, it is difficult to comprehend the domain and even more challenging to choose an appropriate solution for a specific task. Therefore, this paper reviews NoSQL and NewSQL solutions with the objective of: (1) providing a perspective in the field, (2) providing guidance to practitioners and researchers to choose the appropriate data store, and (3) identifying challenges and opportunities in the field. Specifically, the most prominent solutions are compared focusing on data models, querying, scaling, and security related capabilities. Features driving the ability to scale read requests and write requests, or scaling data storage are investigated, in particular partitioning, replication, consistency, and concurrency control. Furthermore, use cases and scenarios in which NoSQL and NewSQL data stores have been used are discussed and the suitability of various solutions for different sets of applications is examined. Consequently, this study has identified challenges in the field, including the immense diversity and inconsistency of terminologies, limited documentation, sparse comparison and benchmarking criteria, and nonexistence of standardized query languages

NewSQL Monitoring System

NewSQL is the new breed of databases that combines the best of RDBMS and NoSQL databases. They provide full ACID compliance like RDBMS and are highly scalable and fault-tolerant similar to NoSQL databases. Thus, NewSQL databases are ideal candidates for supporting big data and applications, particularly financial transaction and fraud detection systems, requiring ACID guarantees. Since NewSQL databases can scale to thousands of nodes, it becomes tedious to monitor the entire cluster and each node. Hence, we are building a NewSQL monitoring system using open-source tools. We will consider VoltDB, a popular open-source NewSQL database, as the database to be monitored. Although a monitoring dashboard exists for VoltDB, it only provides the bird’s eye view of the cluster and the nodes and focuses on CPU usages and security aspects. Therefore, several components of a monitoring system have to be considered and have to be open source to be readily available and congruent with the scalability and fault tolerance of VoltDB. Databases like Cassandra (NoSQL), YugabyteDB (NewSQL), and InfluxDB (Time Series) will be used based on their read/write performances and scalability, fault tolerance to store the monitoring data. We will also consider the role of Amazon Kinesis, a popular queueing, messaging, and streaming engine, since it provides fault-tolerant streaming and batching data pipelines between application and system. This project is implemented using Python and Java

RoboPlanner: Towards an Autonomous Robotic Action Planning Framework for Industry 4.0

Autonomous robots are being increasingly integrated into manufacturing, supply chain and retail industries due to the twin advantages of improved throughput and adaptivity. In order to handle complex Industry 4.0 tasks, the autonomous robots require robust action plans, that can self-adapt to runtime changes. A further requirement is efficient implementation of knowledge bases, that may be queried during planning and execution. In this paper, we propose RoboPlanner, a framework to generate action plans in autonomous robots. In RoboPlanner, we model the knowledge of world models, robotic capabilities and task templates using knowledge property graphs and graph databases. Design time queries and robotic perception are used to enable intelligent action planning. At runtime, integrity constraints on world model observations are used to update knowledge bases. We demonstrate these solutions on autonomous picker robots deployed in Industry 4.0 warehouses