Efficiently correlating complex events over live and archived data streams

• Authors: Nihal Dindar;Peter M. Fischer;Merve Soner;Nesime Tatbul
• Venue: Proceedings of the 5th ACM international conference on Distributed event-based system
• Year: 2011

Correlating complex events over live and archived data streams, which we call Pattern Correlation Queries (PCQs), provides many benefits for domains which need real time forecasting of events or identification of causal dependencies, while handling data at high rates and in massive amounts, like in financial or medical settings. Existing work has focused either on complex event processing over a single type of stream source (i.e., either live or archived), or on simple stream correlation queries (e.g., live events trigerring a database lookup). In this paper, we specifically focus on recency-based PCQs and provide clear, useful, and optimizable semantics for them. PCQs raise a number of challenges in optimizing data management and query processing, which we address in the setting of the DejaVu complex event processing system. More specifically, we propose three complementary optimizations including recent input buffering, query result caching, and join source ordering. Furthermore, we capture the relevant query processing tradeoffs in a cost model. An extensive performance study on synthetic and real-life data sets not only validates this cost model, but also shows that our optimizations are very effective, achieving more than two orders magnitude throughput improvement and much better scalability compared to a conventional approach.