BAD to the bone: Big Active Data at its core

• Published in: The VLDB journal 2020-11, Vol.29 (6), p.1337-1364
• Main Authors: Jacobs, Steven, Wang, Xikui, Carey, Michael J., Tsotras, Vassilis J., Uddin, Md Yusuf Sarwar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer Science; Database Management; Regular Paper
• ISSN: 1066-8888; 0949-877X
• DOI: 10.1007/s00778-020-00616-7

Virtually, all of today’s Big Data systems are passive in nature, responding to queries posted by their users. Instead, we are working to shift Big Data platforms from passive to active . In our view, a Big Active Data (BAD) system should continuously and reliably capture Big Data while enabling timely and automatic delivery of relevant information to a large pool of interested users, as well as supporting retrospective analyses of historical information. While various scalable streaming query engines have been created, their active behavior is limited to a (relatively) small window of the incoming data. To this end, we have created a BAD platform that combines ideas and capabilities from both Big Data and Active Data (e.g., publish/subscribe, streaming engines). It supports complex subscriptions that consider not only newly arrived items but also their relationships to past, stored data. Further, it can provide actionable notifications by enriching the subscription results with other useful data. Our platform extends an existing open-source Big Data Management System, Apache AsterixDB, with an active toolkit . The toolkit contains features to rapidly ingest semistructured data, share execution pipelines among users, manage scaled user data subscriptions, and actively monitor the state of the data to produce individualized information for each user. This paper describes the features and design of our current BAD data platform and demonstrates its ability to scale without sacrificing query capabilities or result individualization.