Data management in cloud environments: NoSQL and NewSQL data stores

NewSQL Databases Assessment: CockroachDB, MariaDB Xpand, and VoltDB

Background: Relational databases have been a prevalent technology for decades, using SQL (Structured Query Language) to manage data. However, the emergence of new technologies, such as the web and the cloud, has brought the requirement to handle more complex data. NewSQL is the latest technology that incorporates the ability to scale and ensures the availability of NoSQL (Not Only SQL) without losing the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) associated with relational databases. Methods: We evaluated CockroachDB, MariaDB Xpand, and VoltDB with OSSpal methodology and experimentally using the Star Schema Benchmark (SSB). The scalability and performance capabilities of each database were assessed. Results: Applying the OSSpal methodology, the results showed that MariaDB Xpand outperformed CockroachDB and VoltDB. On the other hand, we concluded that with Star Schema Benchmark, CockroachDB had better scalability, while VoltDB had a faster query execution time. Conclusions: CockroachDB and VoltDB are the best performing databases in terms of scalability and performance.

Guidelines for establishing a 3-D printing biofabrication laboratory

Advanced manufacturing and 3D printing are transformative technologies currently undergoing rapid adoption in healthcare, a traditionally non-manufacturing sector. Recent development in this field, largely enabled by merging different disciplines, has led to important clinical applications from anatomical models to regenerative bioscaffolding and devices. Although much research to-date has focussed on materials, designs, processes, and products, little attention has been given to the design and requirements of facilities for enabling clinically relevant biofabrication solutions. These facilities are critical to overcoming the major hurdles to clinical translation, including solving important issues such as reproducibility, quality control, regulations, and commercialization. To improve process uniformity and ensure consistent development and production, large-scale manufacturing of engineered tissues and organs will require standardized facilities, equipment, qualification processes, automation, and information systems. This review presents current and forward-thinking guidelines to help design biofabrication laboratories engaged in engineering model and tissue constructs for therapeutic and non-therapeutic applications.

Data in the time of COVID-19: a general methodology to select and secure a NoSQL DBMS for medical data

BACKGROUND

As the COVID-19 crisis endures and the virus continues to spread globally, the need for collecting epidemiological data and patient information also grows exponentially. The race against the clock to find a cure and a vaccine to the disease means researchers require storage of increasingly large and diverse types of information; for doctors following patients, recording symptoms and reactions to treatments, the need for storage flexibility is only surpassed by the necessity of storage security. The volume, variety, and variability of COVID-19 patient data requires storage in NoSQL database management systems (DBMSs). But with a multitude of existing NoSQL DBMSs, there is no straightforward way for institutions to select the most appropriate. And more importantly, they suffer from security flaws that would render them inappropriate for the storage of confidential patient data.

MOTIVATION

This paper develops an innovative solution to remedy the aforementioned shortcomings. COVID-19 patients, as well as medical professionals, could be subjected to privacy-related risks, from abuse of their data to community bullying regarding their medical condition. Thus, in addition to being appropriately stored and analyzed, their data must imperatively be highly protected against misuse.

METHODS

This paper begins by explaining the five most popular categories of NoSQL databases. It also introduces the most popular NoSQL DBMS types related to each one of them. Moreover, this paper presents a comparative study of the different types of NoSQL DBMS, according to their strengths and weaknesses. This paper then introduces an algorithm that would assist hospitals, and medical and scientific authorities to choose the most appropriate type for storing patients' information. This paper subsequently presents a set of functions, based on web services, offering a set of endpoints that include authentication, authorization, auditing, and encryption of information. These functions are powerful and effective, making them appropriate to store all the sensitive data related to patients.

RESULTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS

This paper presents an algorithm to select the most convenient NoSQL DBMS for COVID-19 patients, medical staff, and organizations data. In addition, the paper proposes innovative security solutions that eliminate the barriers to utilizing NoSQL DBMSs to store patients' data. The proposed solutions resolve several security problems including authentication, authorization, auditing, and encryption. After implementing these security solutions, the use of NoSQL DBMSs will become a much more appropriate, safer, and affordable solution to storing and analyzing patients' data, which would contribute greatly to the medical and research effort against COVID-19. This solution can be implemented for all types of NoSQL DBMSs; implementing it would result in highly securing patients' data, and protecting them from any downsides related to data leakage.

Big Data Handling Over Cloud for Internet of Things

In this article, the authors have discussed about the connection between Internet of Things and growth of big data. They have also discussed short reference on the evolution, features, lifecycle, and implementation of Big Data from IoT over the cloud. Internet of Things represents a platform or environment that consists of enormous number of sensors and mediators interconnecting heterogeneous physical devices over the internet. IoT applications are available in many real-world areas such as smart city, smart workplace, smart home, smart transportation and various other ubiquitous computing areas. Using IoT applications generates tremendous amount of data for storage and management in the internet. With the time and research evolution integration of the IoT platforms and cloud comes in the market and IoT platforms data storage and management started shifting to the cloud from the internet connected physical systems for many real-world application areas. Meanwhile when this data becomes huge termed as Big Data. Handling of Big Data over the cloud develops many new areas of research and attention.

Improving the Performance of Data Mining by Using Big Data in Cloud Environment

The volume of business data is increasing very quickly, most of these data are relational. The need to extract knowledge with Data Mining requires keeping all historical data. This complicates more and more the processing and storage of data, and requires further power and capacity which surpass the ability of any machine. So, using distributed environments like cloud computing becomes very useful to share storage and processing between multiple nodes. Unfortunately, data based on relational model cannot be easily used in cloud because of its rigidity and elasticity in such environments. To solve this issue, new big data systems appear such as NoSQL that make data easier to share and distribute in cloud environments. So, this is theoretically beneficial for data mining use case. However, in practice we need to prove it by evaluating performance for both multi-nodes NoSQL and mono-node relational. Also, in case of cloud, it is very interesting to know if performance is still proportionally increasing according to the number of nodes, and if there is an optimum number of nodes in which performance becomes nearly steady or starts dropping off. Motivated by this topic, we propose in this paper an approach to migrate relational data to an appropriate NoSQL system in cloud environment, and then evaluate their performance to capture some interesting results for Data mining. As experimentation, we use industrial data deployed in a data mining process of an oil and gas company. After migrating these data, we perform some experiments to compare and evaluate storage, processing and execution time. As objective, we verify data elasticity, run time performance, and try to find the optimum number of nodes.

Storing massive Resource Description Framework (RDF) data: a survey

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a flexible model for representing information about resources on the Web. As a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Recommendation, RDF has rapidly gained popularity. With the widespread acceptance of RDF on the Web and in the enterprise, a huge amount of RDF data is being proliferated and becoming available. Efficient and scalable management of RDF data is therefore of increasing importance. RDF data management has attracted attention in the database and Semantic Web communities. Much work has been devoted to proposing different solutions to store RDF data efficiently. This paper focusses on using relational databases and NoSQL (for ‘not only SQL (Structured Query Language)’) databases to store massive RDF data. A full up-to-date overview of the current state of the art in RDF data storage is provided in the paper.

Digital data collection in paleoanthropology

Understanding patterns of human evolution across space and time requires synthesizing data collected by independent research teams, and this effort is part of a larger trend to develop cyber infrastructure and e-science initiatives. At present, paleoanthropology cannot easily answer basic questions about the total number of fossils and artifacts that have been discovered, or exactly how those items were collected. In this paper, we examine the methodological challenges to data integration, with the hope that mitigating the technical obstacles will further promote data sharing. At a minimum, data integration efforts must document what data exist and how the data were collected (discovery), after which we can begin standardizing data collection practices with the aim of achieving combined analyses (synthesis). This paper outlines a digital data collection system for paleoanthropology. We review the relevant data management principles for a general audience and supplement this with technical details drawn from over 15 years of paleontological and archeological field experience in Africa and Europe. The system outlined here emphasizes free open-source software (FOSS) solutions that work on multiple computer platforms; it builds on recent advances in open-source geospatial software and mobile computing.