The CoherentPaaS Project is a European FP7 IP 2013-2016 (€5 million) with U. Madrid (leader), INRIA Zenith, FORTH, ICCS, INESC and the companies MonetDB, QuartetFS, Sparsity, Neurocom, Portugal Telecom.
In the cloud computing landscape it has been established that there is “no one size fits all”. This has resulted in a blooming of domain specific cloud data management infrastructures specialized for different kinds of data that are able to achieve orders of magnitude better scaling and performance than traditional generic approaches. In the effort to achieve high scalability in the cloud landscape, the ACID coherence provided in traditional environments has been abandoned within and across data stores. This trend has resulted in a wide diversification of APIs and in the divergence of the programming paradigms used in different domains and for different types of data. Within a single cloud data store, such as key-value data stores or sharded SQL databases, no transactional semantics is provided at the data store level. Instead, sharding (splitting the data into many different pieces) is used to allow for linear scaling. When transactions are provided, they cannot span across shards resulting in an effective loss of transactional semantics across the full store. In addition, across data stores, there is today no notion of coherence for data. Consequently, accessing and managing large amounts of data is becoming a major obstacle to developing new cloud applications and services with correct semantics, requiring tremendous programming effort and expertise.
CoherentPaaS addresses this issue in the cloud PaaS landscape by developing a PaaS that:
- Incorporates a rich and diverse set of cloud data management technologies, including no SQL data stores, such as key-value data stores and graph databases, SQL data stores, such as in-memory and column-oriented databases, hybrid systems, such as SQL engines on top on key-value data stores, and complex event processing data management systems.
- Uses a common query language to unify the programming models of all systems under a single paradigm.
- Provide holistic coherence across data stores using a scalable, transactional management system.
CoherentPaaS will dramatically reduce the effort required to build and the quality of the resulting cloud applications using multiple cloud data management technologies via a single query language, a uniform programming model, and ACID-based global transactional semantics. CoherentPaaS will design and build a working prototype and will validate the proposed technology with real-life use cases.
In this project, Zenith is in charge of designing an SQL-like query language to query multiple databases (SQL, NoSQL) in a cloud and implementing a compiler/optimizer and query engine for that language.
