Cell Stores

TL;DR

Cell stores offer a scalable, relational-like abstraction for business data, enabling efficient storage, retrieval, and interaction with highly dimensional data using modern database technologies, and are compatible with XBRL standards.

Contribution

Introducing cell stores as a novel abstraction that combines relational and NoSQL features for business data management, demonstrated with a real-world SEC filings dataset.

Findings

Real-time data cube retrieval within seconds

Compatibility with XBRL standard for data import/export

Effective handling of highly dimensional data

Abstract

Cell stores provide a relational-like, tabular level of abstraction to business users while leveraging recent database technologies, such as key-value stores and document stores. This allows to scale up and out the efficient storage and retrieval of highly dimensional data. Cells are the primary citizens and exist in different forms, which can be explained with an analogy to the state of matter: as a gas for efficient storage, as a solid for efficient retrieval, and as a liquid for efficient interaction with the business users. Cell stores were abstracted from, and are compatible with the XBRL standard for importing and exporting data. The first cell store repository contains roughly 200GB of SEC filings data, and proves that retrieving data cubes can be performed in real time (the threshold acceptable by a human user being at most a few seconds).