Schema management for document stores

Abstract

Document stores that provide the efficiency of a schema-less interface are widely used by developers in mobile and cloud applications. However, the simplicity developers achieved controversially leads to complexity for data management due to lack of a schema. In this paper, we present a schema management framework for document stores. This framework discovers and persists schemas of JSON records in a repository, and also supports queries and schema summarization. The major technical challenge comes from varied structures of records caused by the schema-less data model and schema evolution. In the discovery phase, we apply a canonical form based method and propose an algorithm based on equivalent sub-trees to group equivalent schemas efficiently. Together with the algorithm, we propose a new data structure, eSiBu-Tree, to store schemas and support queries. In order to present a single summarized representation for heterogenous schemas in records, we introduce the concept of "skeleton", and propose to use it as a relaxed form of the schema, which captures a small set of core attributes. Finally, extensive experiments based on real data sets demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed schema discovery algorithms, and practical use cases in real-world data exploration and integration scenarios are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of using skeletons in these applications.