On the Benefits of Non-Canonical Filtering in Publish/Subscribe Systems

Abstract

Current matching approaches in pub/sub systems only allow conjunctive subscriptions. Arbitrary subscriptions have to be transformed into canonical expressions, e.g., DNFs, and need to be treated as several conjunctive subscriptions. This technique is known from database systems and allows us to apply more efficient filtering algorithms. Since pub/sub systems are the contrary to traditional database systems, it is questionable if filtering several canonical subscriptions is the most efficient and scalable way of dealing with arbitrary subscriptions. In this paper we show that our filtering approach supporting arbitrary Boolean subscriptions is more scalable and efficient than current matching algorithms requiring transformations of subscriptions into DNFs.