The diversity of cloud data management technologies and the increasing demand for efficiency has resulted in the implementation and use of a wide diversity of different cloud data stores – each one specialized and optimal for specific processing, thus leading to a “no one size fits all” situation. Unfortunately, this trend has resulted in a large proliferation of APIs, the lack of a common programming framework and the lack of coherence across different cloud data managers for the corresponding different technologies (ACID coherence provided in traditional transactional environments has been totally lost in the cloud landscape). Pertinent issues also refer to performance and efficiency, which are of major importance for Big Data analytics where emphasis is put on large queries over big cloud data stores. But even emerging Internet of Things applications raise specific challenges with respect to data management, both in real-time and offline. Enhanced complex event processing techniques are required to deal with the huge amounts of data in real-time while application developers require for techniques that will enable them to exploit diverse types of resources and data stores.

CoherentPaaS will provide a rich PaaS with different “one size” data stores optimized for particular tasks, data, and workloads.CoherentPaaS will integrate NoSQL data stores such as key-value data stores and graph databases, SQL data stores such as in-memory and column-oriented databases, hybrid systems such as SQL engines on top on key-value data stores, and complex event processing data management systems.

What is more, CoherentPaaS will provide a common query language for all cloud services and data stores, which will provide a uniform way to access all data stores in an integrated manner. It is federated approach also enables to fully exploit efficiently the capabilities of each cloud data store. CoherentPaaS will enable the development of new cloud applications that exploit the performance and scalability of new cloud data management technology, while hiding the complexity of the underlying technology under a unified query language. Additionally, a scalable transactional management system will provide holistic coherence across data stores. CoherentPaaS will design and implement within each data store the necessary functionality to enable the integration with the new transactional technology in a scalable way, providing a common transactional API to enable the holistic transactional management in order to orchestrate transactions across data management technologies transparently to the applications.

CoherentPaaS outcomes will enable application developers to program with a single query language – aiming at simplicity, across all data management technologies – aiming at scalability, without the need to copy or translate TBs of data from one store to another – aiming at efficiency, while also adding transactional semantics across data stores – aiming at coherence.