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This paper explores scalable implementation strategies for carrying out lazy schema evolution in NoSQL data stores. For decades, schema evolution has been an evergreen in database research. Yet new challenges arise in the context of cloud-hosted data backends: With all database reads and writes charged by the provider, migrating the entire data instance eagerly into a new schema can be prohibitively expensive. Thus, lazy migration may be more cost-efficient, as legacy entities are only migrated in case they are actually accessed by the application. Related work has shown that the overhead of migrating data lazily is affordable when a single evolutionary change is carried out, such as adding a new property. In this paper, we focus on long-term schema evolution, where chains of pending schema evolution operations may have to be applied. Chains occur when legacy entities written several application releases back are finally accessed by the application. We discuss strategies for dealing with chains of evolution operations, in particular, the composition into a single, equivalent composite migration that performs the required version jump. Our experiments with MongoDB focus on scalable implementation strategies. Our lineup further compares the number of write operations, and thus, the operational costs of different data migration strategies.
When an incremental release of a web application is deployed, the structure of data already persisted in the production database may no longer match what the application code expects. Traditionally, eager schema migration is called for, where all legacy data is migrated in one go. With the growing popularity of schema-flexible NoSQL data stores, lazy forms of data migration have emerged: Legacy entities are migrated on-the-fly, one at-a-time, when they are loaded by the application. In this demo, we present Datalution, a tool demonstrating the merits of lazy data migration. Datalution can apply chains of pending schema changes, due to its Datalog-based internal representation. The Datalution approach thus ensures that schema evolution, as part of continous deployment, is carried out correctly.