Tech Report CS-02-01

Monitoring Streams - A New Class of DBMS Applications

Don Carney, Ugur Cetintemel, Mitch Cherniack, Sangdon Lee, Greg Seidman, Michael Stonebraker, Nesime Tatbul, Stan Zdonik

February 2002

Abstract:

This paper introduces monitoring applications, which we will show differ substantially from conventional business data processing. The fact that a software system must process and react to continual inputs from many sources (e.g., sensors) rather than from human operators requires one to rethink the fundamental architecture of a DBMS for this application area. In this paper, we present the architecture of a new DBMS that is currently under construction at Brown, Brandeis, and M.I.T. We describe the basic system architecture, a stream-oriented set of operators, optimization tactics, support for real-time operation, and the design-time environment.

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