Decibel: the relational dataset branching system

As scientific endeavors and data analysis become increasingly collaborative, there is a need for data management systems that natively support the versioning or branching of datasets to enable concurrent analysis, cleaning, integration, manipulation, or curation of data across teams of individuals....

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Elmore, Aaron J., Parameswaran, Aditya, Deshpande, Amol, Goehring, David G., Maddox, Michael A, Madden, Samuel R
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112346
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4703-6281
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5775-8571
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7470-3265
Description
Summary:As scientific endeavors and data analysis become increasingly collaborative, there is a need for data management systems that natively support the versioning or branching of datasets to enable concurrent analysis, cleaning, integration, manipulation, or curation of data across teams of individuals. Common practice for sharing and collaborating on datasets involves creating or storing multiple copies of the dataset, one for each stage of analysis, with no provenance information tracking the relationships between these datasets. This results not only in wasted storage, but also makes it challenging to track and integrate modifications made by different users to the same dataset. In this paper, we introduce the Relational Dataset Branching System, Decibel, a new relational storage system with built-in version control designed to address these short-comings. We present our initial design for Decibel and provide a thorough evaluation of three versioned storage engine designs that focus on efficient query processing with minimal storage overhead. We also develop an exhaustive benchmark to enable the rigorous testing of these and future versioned storage engine designs.