COMPOSITE NESTED STREAMS

• US 20090030926A1
• Filed: 07/24/2007
• Published: 01/29/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 07/24/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Meijer, Henricus Johannes Maria, Aharoni, Avner Y.
• Granted Patent: US 8,156,149 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/24568 Data stream processing; Continuous queries

Abstract

Reshaping of streams is provided to facilitate utilizing the streams without rapidly increasing memory requirements as the size of the stream increases. The streams can be pushed to alternative storage upon being reshaped, for example, such as to a persistent storage. If the streams lose structure, for example if a hierarchical stream is reshaped into a flat structure for storage in a database, structural information can be stored along with the streams and utilized to shape the stream to its original structure upon request for data, for example. Streams can be pulled from an exposing device or application, and portions of the stream can be transformed and stored according to a set of stop elements; the stop elements can be associated with functions that take action on the stream upon reaching a stop element, such as transforming and storing a portion thereof.

Claims

1. A system for transforming a stream into a disparate structure, comprising:

a composite stream transformation component that transforms a portion of a data stream into a disparately structured format while maintaining structure indicators for subsequent restructuring of at least a subset of the portion of the data stream; and

a data stream store that stores the transformed data stream and allows subsequent access to the transformed data stream.

2. The system of claim 1, the data stream is hierarchically formatted and the composite stream transformation component transforms the portion of the stream into a flat format.

3. The system of claim 1, the disparately structured format is a relational database format and primary keys facilitate the maintaining structure indicators.

4. The system of claim 3, the composite stream transformation component restructures the subset of the portion of the data stream by associating elements of the subset into a hierarchy according to the primary keys.

5. The system of claim 1, further comprising a data access component that responds to one or more requests for the subset of the portion of the data stream.

6. The system of claim 1, the composite stream transformation component pulls the data stream from a component exposing the stream.

7. The system of claim 6, the composite stream transformation component can pull an available portion of the data stream from the component exposing the stream and interpret the stream one element at a time until consuming a stop element.

8. The system of claim 7, the composite stream transformation component executes a callback function based on the stop element, the callback function transforms the subset of the portion of the data stream into the disparately structured format and outputs the disparately structured subset to the data stream store.

9. The system of claim 1, the composite stream transformation component uses inference to define at least one transformation function that transforms the subset of the portion of the data stream.

10. A method for transforming a hierarchical stream into a flat structure, comprising:

consuming a hierarchically formatted stream comprised of a plurality of nested elements;

transforming a portion of the stream into a flat structure while maintaining hierarchical indicia; and

storing the transformed portion of the stream in a persistent data store according to the flat structure.

11. The method of claim 10, further comprising facilitating access to the portion of the stream by restructuring the stream in hierarchical format utilizing the hierarchical indicia.

12. The method of claim 10, further comprising associating a stop element related to the stream with a function for performing an activity on the stream.

13. The method of claim 12, the stop element relates to an identifier in the string that triggers the function when the stop element is consumed.

14. The method of claim 12, the function defines procedures for the transforming a portion of the stream and storing the transformed portion of the stream.

15. The method of claim 10, further comprising requesting a stream of one element from the consumed stream to maintain the hierarchical format and an order of the stream when transforming the portion of the stream and storing the transformed portion of the stream.

16. The method of claim 15, further comprising asynchronously consuming subsequent portions of the stream upon receiving the stream of one element.

17. The method of claim 10, the stream is consumed based at least in part on a request for data made to the persistent data store.

18. The method of claim 10, the stream is structured in an extensible markup language (XML) format and is transformed into a relational database structure.

19. A system for reshaping a portion of a stream into a disparate structure, comprising:

means for consuming a nested data input stream;

means for reshaping the data input stream into a disparate flat structure while retaining aspects corresponding to the original nested structure;

means for pushing the reshaped data stream to an output stream for storage thereof.

20. The system of claim 19, further comprising means for facilitating access to requests for the reshaped data, the reshaped data is shaped into the original nested structure using the retained aspects.