A novel cloud based elastic framework for big data preprocessing

A number of analytical big data services based on the cloud computing paradigm such as Amazon Redshift and Google Bigquery have recently emerged. These services are based on columnar databases rather than traditional Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) and are able to analyse massive datasets in mere seconds. This has led many organisations to retain and analyse their massive logs, sensory or marketing datasets, which were previously discarded due to the inability to either store or analyse them. Although these big data services have addressed the issue of big data analysis, the ability to efficiently de-normalise and prepare this data to a format that can be imported into these services remains a challenge. This paper describes and implements a novel, generic and scalable cloud based elastic framework for Big Data Preprocessing (BDP). Since the approach described by this paper is entirely based on cloud computing it is also possible to measure the overall cost incurred by these preprocessing activities.