Story Book: An Efficient Extensible Provenance Framework

Most application provenance systems are hard coded for a particular type of system or data, while current provenance file systems maintain in-memory provenance graphs and reside in kernel space, leading to complex and constrained implementations. Story Book resides in user space, and treats provenance events as a generic event log, leading to a simple, flexible and easily optimized system. We demonstrate the flexibility of our design by adding provenance to a number of different systems, including a file system, database and a number of file types, and by implementing two separate storage backends. Although Story Book is nearly 2.5 times slower than ext3 under worst case workloads, this is mostly due to FUSE message passing overhead. Our experiments show that coupling our simple design with existing storage optimizations provides higher throughput than existing systems.