MDICA: Maintenance of Data Integrity in Column-oriented database Applications

Abstract

Current information technologies generate large amounts of data for management or further analysis, storing it in NoSQL databases which provide horizontal scaling and high performance, supporting many read/write operations per second. NoSQL column-oriented databases, such as Cassandra and HBase, are usually modelled following a query-driven approach, resulting in denormalized databases where the same data can be repeated in several tables. Therefore, maintaining data integrity relies on client applications to ensure that, for data changes that occur, the affected tables will be appropriately updated. We devise a method called MDICA that, given a data insertion at a conceptual level, determines the required actions to maintain database integrity in column-oriented databases. This method is implemented for Cassandra database applications. MDICA is based on the definition of (1) rules to determine the tables that will be impacted by the insertion, (2) procedures to generate the statements to ensure data integrity and (3) messages to warn the user about errors or potential problems. This method helps developers in two ways: generating the statements needed to maintain data integrity and producing messages to avoid problems such as loss of information, redundant repeated data or gaps of information in tables.