The Time Machine in NoSQL

Not Only SQL (NoSQL) is a recent technology that is scalable and provides flexible schemas, thereby complementing existing relational database technologies. Although NoSQL is flourishing, present solutions lack the features required by enterprises for critical missions. In this paper, we explore solutions to the data recovery issue in NoSQL. Data recovery for any database table entails restoring the table to a prior state or replaying (insert/update) operations over the table given a time period in the past. Recovery of NoSQL database tables enables applications such as failure recovery, analysis for historical data, debugging, and auditing. In this paper, we firstly present two solutions to address the data recovery problem in NoSQL; each solution has its pros and cons. We implement our proposals based on Apache HBase, a popular NoSQL database in the Hadoop ecosystem. Our implementations are extensively benchmarked with an industrial NoSQL benchmark under real environments.