Feasibility analysis of AsterixDB and Spark streaming with Cassandra for stream-based processing

Abstract For getting up-to-date insight into online services, extracted data has to be processed in near real time. For example, major big data companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) analyse streaming data for development of new services. Several technologies have been developed, which could be selected for implementation of stream processing functionalities. The contribution of this paper is feasibility analysis of technologies for stream-based processing of semi-structured data. Particularly, feasibility of a Big Data management system for semi-structured data (AsterixDB) will be compared to Spark streaming, which has been integrated with Cassandra NoSQL database for persistence. The study focuses on stream processing in a simulated social media use case (tweet analysis), which has been implemented to Eucalyptus cloud computing environment on a distributed shared memory multiprocessor platform. The results indicate that AsterixDB is able to provide significantly better performance both in terms of throughput and latency, when data feed functionality of AsterixDB is used, and stream processing has been implemented with Java. AsterixDB also scaled on the same level or better, when the amount of nodes on the cloud platform was increased. However, stream processing in AsterixDB was delayed by batching of data, when tweets were streamed into the database with data feeds.