Web Mining Accelerated with In-Memory and Column Store Technology

Current web mining approaches use massive amounts of commodity hardware and processing time to leverage analytics for today’s web. For a seamless application interaction, those approaches have to use pre-aggregated results and indexes to circumvent the slow processing on their data stores e.g. relational databases or document stores. The upcoming trend of in-memory, column-oriented databases is widely used to accelerate business analytics like financial reports, but the application on large text corpora remains unaffected. We argue that although in-memory, column-oriented stores are tailor-made for traditional data schemes, they are also applicable for web mining applications that mainly consists of raw text informations enriched with limited semantic meta data. Thus, we implement a web mining application that stores every information in a pure main memory data store. We experience an acceleration of current web mining queries and identify new opportunities for web mining applications. To evaluate the performance impact, we compare the run-time of general web mining tasks on a traditional row-oriented, disc-based database and a column-oriented, in-memory database using the example of BlogIntelligence, which serves exemplary for web mining applications.