Data Streams as an Element of Modern Decision Support
Authors: Chatziantoniou Damianos , Doukidis George 
Published: May 2011

Traditional decision support systems (DSS) and executive information systems (EIS) gather and present information from several sources for business purposes. It is an information technology to help the knowledge worker (executive, manager, analyst) make faster and better decisions. So far, these data were stored statically and persistently in a database, typically in a data warehouse. Data warehouses collect masses of operational data, allowing analysts to extract information by issuing decision support queries on the otherwise discarded data. In a typical scenario, an organization stores a detailed record of its operations in a database, which is then analyzed to improve efficiency, detect sales opportunities, and so on. Performing complex analysis on these data is an essential component of these organizations’ businesses. Chaudhuri and Dayal (1997) present an excellent survey on decision-making and online analytical processing (OLAP) technologies for traditional database systems. ?n many applications however, it may not be possible to process queries within a database management system (DBMS). These applications involve data items that arrive online from multiple sources in a continuous, rapid and time-varying fashion (Babcock et. al., 2002). These data may or may not be stored in a database. As a result, a new class of data-intensive applications has recently attracted a lot of attention: applications in which the data is modeled not as persistent relations but rather as transient data streams. Examples include financial applications (streams of transactions or ticks), network monitoring (stream of packets), security, telecommunication data management (stream of calls or call packets), web applications (clickstreams), manufacturing, wireless sensor networks (measurements), RFID data, and others. In data streams we usually have “continuous” queries (Terry et. al., 1992; Babu & Widom, 2002) rather than “one-time.” The answer to a continuous query is produced over time, reflecting the stream data seen so far. Answers may be stored and updated as new data arrives or may be produced as data streams themselves. Continuous queries can be used for monitoring, alerting, security, personalization, etc. Data streams can be either transactional (i.e., log interactions between entities, such as credit card purchases, web clickstreams, phone calls), or measurement (i.e., monitor evolution of entity states, such as physical phenomena, road traffic, temperature, network). How to best model, express and evaluate complex queries over data streams is an open and difficult problem. This involves data modeling, rich querying capabilities to support real-time decision support and mining, and novel evaluation and optimization processing techniques. In addition, the kind of decision support over data streams is quite different from “traditional” decision-making: decisions are “tactical” rather than “strategic.” Research on data streams is currently among the most active areas in database research community. Flexible and efficient stream querying will be a crucial component of any future data management and decision support system (Abiteboul et al., 2005).