Subscribing to Big Data at Scale

Today, data is being actively generated by a variety of devices, services, and applications. Such data is important not only for the information that it contains, but also for its relationships to other data and to interested users. Most existing Big Data systems focus on passively answering queries from users, rather than actively collecting data, processing it, and serving it to users. To satisfy both passive and active requests at scale, users need either to heavily customize an existing passive Big Data system or to glue multiple systems together. Either choice would require significant effort from users and incur additional overhead. In this paper, we present the BAD (Big Active Data) system, which is designed to preserve the merits of passive Big Data systems and introduce new features for actively serving Big Data to users at scale. We show the design and implementation of the BAD system, demonstrate how BAD facilitates providing both passive and active data services, investigate the BAD system's performance at scale, and illustrate the complexities that would result from instead providing BAD-like services with a "glued" system.