Analytics in Motion (AIM) - PAST PROJECT

Description:

The goal of Analytics in Motion (AIM) is to bridge the gap between write-optimized storage systems used for Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) and read-optimized structures used in Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) with a single shared data storage. The motivation for this is to allow data to be processed in REAL-TIME, which cannot be achieved by the traditional Data Warehousing approach where two separated storage systems are used and data is regularly shifted from the (write-optimized) OLTP to the (read-only) OLAP storage.

The AIM storage manager is a distributed key-value store and builds on well-established methods like Differential Updates, Partitioned Data Processing, Shared Scan and a novel PAX-based data structure called ColumMap. It makes use of modern hardware features like SIMD registers and cut-of-the-edge networking technologies like RDMA and Infinband.

The industrial use case that motivated AIM is a Telco billing system that is currently being designed by Huawei Technologies. The system should be able to process 10,000 up to 100,000 events per second and to answer up to 100 real-time analytical queries per second in less than 100 milliseconds for analytical data between 30GB to 300GB. Ideally, the system should scale near-linearly from 1 to 10 nodes.

After having implemented a first prototype that meets the requirements of the industrial use case, we are now looking into how we could make the system persistent (e.g. by using a log-based file system), how to extend it to efficiently process joins and what are the trade-offs between different alternatives for update processing (copy-on-write / differential updates / in-place with multiple versions). In addition, we have started comparing our system to commercial competitors as well as comparable research prototypes like druid.io and HyPer.

Publications:

Publication in the Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data. ACM, 2015. This publication is based on a collaborative research project with the DB group of Huawei in its European Reaseach Center (DBERC):
Lucas Braun, Thomas Etter, Georgios Gasparis, Martin Kaufmann, Donald Kossmann, Daniel Widmer, Aharon Avitzur, Anthony Iliopoulos, Eliezer Levy, Ning Liang: Analytics in Motion - High Performance Event-Processing AND Real-Time Analytics in the Same Database

Project Members:

  • Lucas Braun
  • Donald Kossmann

Opportunities:

Did you get curious or even enthusiastic about this project? We are always searching for students interested in writing their Master's Thesis or doing lab projects with us. If you are interested in main-memory databases, streaming systems, or using new hardware features (like SIMD) and have reasonable knowledge of C++, just send us an email!

Former Project Members:

  • Thomas Etter
  • Georgios Gasparis
  • Martin Kaufmann
  • Daniel Widmer

Master's Thesis in this project: