Challenges and Solutions for Processing Real-Time Big Data Stream: A Systematic Literature Review

Contribution: Recently, real-time data warehousing (DWH) and big data streaming have become ubiquitous due to the fact that a number of business organizations are gearing up to gain competitive advantage. The capability of organizing big data in efficient manner to reach a business decision empowers data warehousing in terms of real-time stream processing. A systematic literature review for real-time stream processing systems is presented in this paper which rigorously look at the recent developments and challenges of real-time stream processing systems and can serve as a guide for the implementation of real-time stream processing framework for all shapes of data streams. Background: Published surveys and reviews either cover papers focusing on stream analysis in applications other than real-time DWH or focusing on extraction, transformation, loading (ETL) challenges for traditional DWH. This systematic review attempts to answer four specific research questions. Research Questions: 1)Which are the relevant publication channels for real-time stream processing research? 2) Which challenges have been faced during implementation of real-time stream processing? 3) Which approaches/tools have been reported to address challenges introduced at ETL stage while processing real-time stream for real-time DWH? 4) What evidence have been reported while addressing different challenges for processing real-time stream? Methodology: A systematic literature was conducted to compile studies related to publication channels targeting real-time stream processing/joins challenges and developments. Following a formal protocol, semi-automatic and manual searches were performed for work from 2011 to 2020 excluding research in traditional data warehousing. Of 679,547 papers selected for data extraction, 74 were retained after quality assessment. Findings: This systematic literature highlights implementation challenges along with developed approaches for real-time DWH and big data stream processing systems and provides their comparisons. This study found that there exists various algorithms for implementing real-time join processing at ETL stage for structured data whereas less work for un-structured data is found in this subject matter.