Evolutionary Tree-Structured Storage: Concepts, Interfaces, and Applications
Evolutionary Tree-Structured Storage: Concepts, Interfaces, and Applications Dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Natural Sciences Presented by Marc Yves Maria Kramis at the Faculty of Sciences Department of Computer and Information Science Date of the oral examination: 22.04.2014 First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marcel Waldvogel Second supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marc Scholl i Abstract Life is subdued to constant evolution. So is our data, be it in research, business or personal information management. From a natural, evolutionary perspective, our data evolves through a sequence of fine-granular modifications resulting in myriads of states, each describing our data at a given point in time. From a technical, anti- evolutionary perspective, mainly driven by technological and financial limitations, we treat the modifications as transient commands and only store the latest state of our data. It is surprising that the current approach is to ignore the natural evolution and to willfully forget about the sequence of modifications and therefore the past state. Sticking to this approach causes all kinds of confusion, complexity, and performance issues. Confusion, because we still somehow want to retrieve past state but are not sure how. Complexity, because we must repeatedly work around our own obsolete approaches. Performance issues, because confusion times complexity hurts. It is not surprising, however, that intelligence agencies notoriously try to collect, store, and analyze what the broad public willfully forgets. Significantly faster and cheaper random-access storage is the key driver for a paradigm shift towards remembering the sequence of modifications. We claim that (1) faster storage allows to efficiently and cleverly handle finer-granular modifi- cations and (2) that mandatory versioning elegantly exposes past state, radically simplifies the applications, and effectively lays a solid foundation for backing up, distributing and scaling of our data.
[Show full text]