The concept of data spaces has emerged as a structured, scalable solution to streamline and harmonize data sharing across established ecosystems. Simultaneously, the rise of AI services enhances the extraction of predictive insights, operational efficiency, and decision-making. Despite the potential of combining these two advancements, integration remains challenging: data spaces technology is still developing, and AI services require further refinement in areas like ML workflow orchestration and energy-efficient ML algorithms. In this paper, we introduce an integrated architectural framework, developed under the Green.Dat.AI project, that unifies the strengths of data spaces and AI to enable efficient, collaborative data sharing across sectors. A practical application is illustrated through a smart farming use case, showcasing how AI services within a data space can advance sustainable agricultural innovation. Integrating data spaces with AI services thus maximizes the value of decentralized data while enhancing efficiency through a powerful combination of data and AI capabilities.

There is an increasing demand for stateful edge computing for both complex Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and application services in emerging 5G networks. Managing a mutable persistent state in the edge does however bring new architectural, performance, and dependability challenges. Not only it has to be integrated with existing cloud-based systems, but also cope with both operational and analytical workloads and be compatible with a variety of SQL and NoSQL database management systems. We address these challenges with AIDA-DB, a polyglot data management architecture for the edge and cloud continuum. It leverages recent development in distributed transaction processing for a reliable mutable state in operational workloads, with a flexible synchronization mechanism for efficient data collection in cloud-based analytical workloads.

The increasing number of IoT devices and digital services offers cross-domain sensing and control opportunities to a growing set of stakeholders. The provision of cross-domain digital services requires interoperability as a key enabler to bridge domain specifics, while inferring knowledge and allowing new data-driven services.

In the context of the CloudDBAppliance (CDBA) project, fault tolerance and high-availability are provided in layers: within each appliance, within a data centre and between data centres. This paper presents the proposed replication architecture for providing fault tolerance and high availability within a data centre. This layer configuration, along with specific deployment constraints require a custom replication architecture. In particular, replication must be implemented at the middleware-level, to avoid constraining the backing operational database. This paper is focused on the design of the CDBA Replication Manager along with an evaluation, using micro-benchmarking, of components for the replication middleware. Results show the impact, on both throughput and latency, of the replication mechanisms in place.

In the context of the CloudDBAppliance (CDBA) project, fault tolerance and high-availability are provided in layers: within each appliance, within a data centre and between datacentres.This paper presents the recovery mechanisms in place to fulfill the provision of high-availability within a datacentre.The recovery mechanism takes advantage of CDBA's in-middleware replication mechanism to bring failed replicas up-to-date.Along with the description of different variants of the recovery mechanism, this paper provides their comparative evaluation, focusing on the time it takes to recover a failed replica and how the recovery process impacts throughput.

Testing large-scale distributed system software is still far from practical as the sheer scale needed and the inherent non-determinism make it very expensive to deploy and use realistically large environments, even with cloud computing and state-of-the-art automation. Moreover, observing global states without disturbing the system under test is itself difficult. This is particularly troubling as the gap between distributed algorithms and their implementations can easily introduce subtle bugs that are disclosed only with suitably large scale tests. We address this challenge with Minha, a framework that virtualizes multiple JVM instances in a single JVM, thus simulating a distributed environment where each host runs on a separate machine, accessing dedicated network and CPU resources. The key contributions are the ability to run off-the-shelf concurrent and distributed JVM bytecode programs while at the same time scaling up to thousands of virtual nodes; and enabling global observation within standard software testing frameworks. Our experiments with two distributed systems show the usefulness of Minha in disclosing errors, evaluating global properties, and in scaling tests orders of magnitude with the same hardware resources.

The increasing demand for real-time analytics requires the fusion of Transactional (OLTP) and Analytical (OLAP) systems, eschewing ETL processes and introducing a plethora of proposals for the so-called Hybrid Analytical and Transactional Processing (HTAP) systems.

Buffer caching mechanisms are paramount to improve the performance of today's massive scale NoSQL databases. In this work, we show that in fact there is a direct and univocal relationship between the resource usage and the cache hit ratio in NoSQL databases. In addition, this relationship can be leveraged to build a mechanism that is able to estimate resource usage of the nodes composing the NoSQL cluster.

Window functions are a sub-class of analytical operators that allow data to be handled in a derived view of a given relation, while taking into account their neighboring tuples. We propose a technique that can be used in the parallel execution of this operator when data is naturally partitioned. The proposed method benefits the cases where the required partitioning is not the natural partitioning employed. Preliminary evaluation shows that we are able to limit data transfer among parallel workers to 14% of the registered transfer when using a naive approach.

In the pursuit of highly available systems, storage systems began offering eventually consistent data models. These models are suitable for a number of applications but not applicable for all. In this paper we discuss a system that can offer a eventually consistent data model but can also, when needed, offer a strong consistent one.

NoSQL databases opt not to offer important abstractions traditionally found in relational databases in order to achieve high levels of scalability and availability: transactional guarantees and strong data consistency. In this work we propose pH1, a generic middleware layer over NoSQL databases that offers transactional guarantees with Snapshot Isolation. This is achieved in a non-intrusive manner, requiring no modifications to servers and no native support for multiple versions. Instead, the transactional context is achieved by means of a multiversion distributed cache and an external transaction certifier, exposed by extending the client's interface with transaction bracketing primitives. We validate and evaluate pH1 with Apache Cassandra and Hyperdex. First, using the YCSB benchmark, we show that the cost of providing ACID guarantees to these NoSQL databases amounts to 11% decrease in throughput. Moreover, using the transaction intensive TPC-C workload, pH1 presented an impact of 22% decrease in throughput. This contrasts with OMID, a previous proposal that takes advantage of HBase's support for multiple versions, with a throughput penalty of 76% in the same conditions.

The ability to access and query data stored in multiple versions is an important asset for many applications, such as Web graph analysis, collaborative editing platforms, data forensics, or correlation mining. The storage and retrieval of versioned data requires a specific API and support from the storage layer. The choice of the data structures used to maintain versioned data has a fundamental impact on the performance of insertions and queries. The appropriate data structure also depends on the nature of the versioned data and the nature of the access patterns. In this paper we study the design and implementation space for providing versioning support on top of a distributed key-value store (KVS). We define an API for versioned data access supporting multiple writers and show that a plain KVS does not offer the necessary synchronization power for implementing this API. We leverage the support for listeners at the KVS level and propose a general construction for implementing arbitrary types of data structures for storing and querying versioned data. We explore the design space of versioned data storage ranging from a flat data structure to a distributed sharded index. The resulting system, ALEPH, is implemented on top of an industrial-grade open-source KVS, Infinispan. Our evaluation, based on real-world Wikipedia access logs, studies the performance of each versioning mechanisms in terms of load balancing, latency and storage overhead in the context of different access scenarios.