High-performance complex event processing over hierarchical data

Abstract

While Complex Event Processing (CEP) constitutes a considerable portion of the so-called Big Data analytics, current CEP systems can only process data having a simple structure, and are otherwise limited in their ability to efficiently support complex continuous queries on structured or semistructured information. However, XML-like streams represent a very popular form of data exchange, comprising large portions of social network and RSS feeds, financial feeds, configuration files, and similar applications requiring advanced CEP queries. In this article, we present the XSeq language and system that support CEP on XML streams, via an extension of XPath that is both powerful and amenable to an efficient implementation. Specifically, the XSeq language extends XPath with natural operators to express sequential and Kleene-* patterns over XML streams, while remaining highly amenable to efficient execution. In fact, XSeq is designed to take full advantage of the recently proposed Visibly Pushdown Automata (VPA), where higher expressive power can be achieved without compromising the computationally attractive properties of finite state automata. Besides the efficiency and expressivity benefits, the choice of VPA as the underlying model also enables XSeq to go beyond XML streams and be easily applicable to any data with both sequential and hierarchical structures, including JSON messages, RNA sequences, and software traces. Therefore, we illustrate the XSeq's power for CEP applications through examples from different domains and provide formal results on its expressiveness and complexity. Finally, we present several optimization techniques for XSeq queries. Our extensive experiments indicate that XSeq brings outstanding performance to CEP applications: two orders of magnitude improvement is obtained over the same queries executed in general-purpose XML engines.