Abstract In this paper, we present the first comprehensive survey of window types for stream processing systems which have been presented in research and commercial systems. We cover publications from the most relevant conferences, journals, and system whitepapers on stream processing, windowing, and window aggregation which have been published over the last 20 years. For each window type, we provide detailed specifications, formal notations, synonyms, and use-case examples. We classify each window type according to categories that have been proposed in literature and describe the out-of-order processing. In addition, we examine academic, commercial, and open-source systems with respect to the window types that they support. Our survey offers a comprehensive overview that may serve as a guideline for the development of stream processing systems, window aggregation techniques, and frameworks that support a variety of window types.

S.517-522

Protection of personal data has been raised to be among the top requirements of modern systems. At the same time, it is now frequent that the owner of the data and the owner of the computing infrastructure are two entities with limited trust between them (e. g., volunteer computing or the hybrid-cloud). Recently, trusted execution environments (TEEs) became a viable solution to ensure the security of systems in such environments. However, the performance of relational operators in TEEs remains an open problem. We conduct a comprehensive experimental study to identify the main bottlenecks and challenges when executing relational equi-joins in TEEs. For this, we introduce TEEbench, a framework for unified benchmarking of relational operators in TEEs, and use it for conducting our experimental evaluation. In a nutshell, we perform the following experimental analysis for eight core join algorithms: off-the-shelf performance; the performance implications of data sealing and obliviousness; sensitivity and scalability. The results show that all eight join algorithms significantly suffer from different performance bottlenecks in TEEs. They can be up to three orders of magnitude slower in TEEs than on plain CPUs. Our study also indicates that existing join algorithms need a complete, hardware-aware redesign to be efficient in TEEs, and that, in secure query plans, managing TEE features is equally important to join selection.

Window aggregation is a core operation in data stream processing. Existing aggregation techniques focus on reducing latency, eliminating redundant computations, or minimizing memory usage. However, each technique operates under different assumptions with respect to workload characteristics, such as properties of aggregation functions (e.g., invertible, associative), window types (e.g., sliding, sessions), windowing measures (e.g., time- or count-based), and stream (dis)order. In this article, we present Scotty , an efficient and general open-source operator for sliding-window aggregation in stream processing systems, such as Apache Flink, Apache Beam, Apache Samza, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, and Apache Storm. One can easily extend Scotty with user-defined aggregation functions and window types. Scotty implements the concept of general stream slicing and derives workload characteristics from aggregation queries to improve performance without sacrificing its general applicability. We provide an in-depth view on the algorithms of the general stream slicing approach. Our experiments show that Scotty outperforms alternative solutions.

Stream Processing Engines (SPEs) execute long-running queries on unbounded data streams. They follow an interpretation-based processing model and do not perform runtime optimizations. This limits the utilization of modern hardware and neglects changing data characteristics at runtime. In this paper, we present Grizzly, a novel adaptive query compilation-based SPE, to enable highly efficient query execution. We extend query compilation and task-based parallelization for the unique requirements of stream processing and apply adaptive compilation to enable runtime re-optimizations. The combination of light-weight statistic gathering with just-in-time compilation enables Grizzly to adjust to changing data-characteristics dynamically at runtime. Our experiments show that Grizzly outperforms state-of-the-art SPEs by up to an order of magnitude in throughput.

In the Internet of Things, billions of sensors provide data streams to applications. The data are predominately acquired from devices with constrained computational capabilities, often serving multiple queries simultaneously. Sensor nodes, are typically oblivious to the specific needs of applications. The potential requirements of diverse applications force them to push data at a higher rate than required by a specific, currently running application. That is suboptimal due to 1. constraints in the network bandwidth, 2. expenses for transmissions, and 3. limited computational power. However, decreasing data gathering frequency may reduce the applications' accuracy. In this paper, we demonstrate a technique for minimizing the number of network transmissions while maintaining the desired accuracy. The presented algorithm for read- and transmission-sharing among queries goes hand-in-hand with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for adaptive sampling. We 1. implement the technique and deploy it on a sensor node, 2. replay sensor-data from two real-world scenarios, 3. provide an interface for submitting custom queries, and 4. present an interactive dashboard. Here, visitors observe live statistics on the read- and transmission savings achieved in real-world use-cases. The dashboard also visualizes optimizations currently performed by the read scheduling procedure and hence conveys real-time insights and a deep understanding of the presented algorithm.

International audience

Window aggregation is a core operation in data stream processing. Existing aggregation techniques focus on reducing latency, eliminating redundant computations, and minimizing memory usage. However, each technique operates under different assumptions with respect to workload characteristics such as properties of aggregation functions (e.g., invertible, associative), window types (e.g., sliding, sessions), windowing measures (e.g., time- or count-based), and stream (dis)order. Violating the assumptions of a technique can deem it unusable or drastically reduce its performance. In this paper, we present the first general stream slicing technique for window aggregation. General stream slicing automatically adapts to workload characteristics to improve performance without sacrificing its general applicability. As a prerequisite, we identify workload characteristics which affect the performance and applicability of aggregation techniques. Our experiments show that general stream slicing outperforms alternative concepts by up to one order of magnitude.

Modern Stream Processing Engines (SPEs) process large data volumes under tight latency constraints. Many SPEs execute processing pipelines using message passing on shared-nothing architectures and apply a partition-based scale-out strategy to handle high-velocity input streams. Furthermore, many state-of-the-art SPEs rely on a Java Virtual Machine to achieve platform independence and speed up system development by abstracting from the underlying hardware. In this paper, we show that taking the underlying hardware into account is essential to exploit modern hardware efficiently. To this end, we conduct an extensive experimental analysis of current SPEs and SPE design alternatives optimized for modern hardware. Our analysis highlights potential bottlenecks and reveals that state-of-the-art SPEs are not capable of fully exploiting current and emerging hardware trends, such as multi-core processors and high-speed networks. Based on our analysis, we describe a set of design changes to the common architecture of SPEs to scale-up on modern hardware. We show that the single-node throughput can be increased by up to two orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art SPEs by applying specialized code generation, fusing operators, batch-style parallelization strategies, and optimized windowing. This speedup allows for deploying typical streaming applications on a single or a few nodes instead of large clusters.

Computing aggregates over windows is at the core of virtually every stream processing job. Typical stream processing applications involve overlapping windows and, therefore, cause redundant computations. Several techniques prevent this redundancy by sharing partial aggregates among windows. However, these techniques do not support out-of-order processing and session windows. Out-of-order processing is a key requirement to deal with delayed tuples in case of source failures such as temporary sensor outages. Session windows are widely used to separate different periods of user activity from each other. In this paper, we present Scotty, a high throughput operator for window discretization and aggregation. Scotty splits streams into non-overlapping slices and computes partial aggregates per slice. These partial aggregates are shared among all concurrent queries with arbitrary combinations of tumbling, sliding, and session windows. Scotty introduces the first slicing technique which (1) enables stream slicing for session windows in addition to tumbling and sliding windows and (2) processes out-of-order tuples efficiently. Our technique is generally applicable to a broad group of dataflow systems which use a unified batch and stream processing model. Our experiments show that we achieve a throughput an order of magnitude higher than alternative state-of-the-art solutions.

Aggregation queries on data streams are evaluated over evolving and often overlapping logical views called windows. While the aggregation of periodic windows were extensively studied in the past through the use of aggregate sharing techniques such as Panes and Pairs, little to no work has been put in optimizing the aggregation of very common, non-periodic windows. Typical examples of non-periodic windows are punctuations and sessions which can implement complex business logic and are often expressed as user-defined operators on platforms such as Google Dataflow or Apache Storm. The aggregation of such non-periodic or user-defined windows either falls back to expensive, best-effort aggregate sharing methods, or is not optimized at all.