Nova: continuous Pig/Hadoop workflows.

ABSTRACTThis paper describes a workflow manager developed and deployed at Yahoo called Nova, which pushes continually-arriving data through graphs of Pig programs executing on Hadoop clusters. (Pig is a structured dataflow language and runtime for the Hadoop map-reduce system.) Nova is like data stream managers in its support for stateful incremental processing, but unlike them in that it deals with data in large batches using disk-based processing. Batched incremental processing is a good fit for a large fraction of Yahoo's data processing use-cases, which deal with continually-arriving data and benefit from incremental algorithms, but do not require ultra-low-latency processing.