An Efficient Publish/Subscribe Index for E-Commerce Databases

Many of today's publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems have been designed to cope with a large volume of subscriptions and high event arrival rate (velocity). However, in many novel applications (such as e-commerce), there is an increasing variety of items, each with different attributes. This leads to a very high-dimensional and sparse database that existing pub/sub systems can no longer support effectively. In this paper, we propose an efficient in-memory index that is scalable to the volume and update of subscriptions, the arrival rate of events and the variety of subscribable attributes. The index is also extensible to support complex scenarios such as prefix/suffix filtering and regular expression matching. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic datasets and two real datasets (AOL query log and Ebay products). The results demonstrate the superiority of our index over state-of-the-art methods: our index incurs orders of magnitude less index construction time, consumes a small amount of memory and performs event matching efficiently.