Sky is a system for analyzing behavior for a given object and aggregating and segmenting that behavioral analysis across all objects in the system.
The basic unit in Sky is the Event. An Event consists of two types of data: an
action & a state change. Both are optional but an event needs at least one to
exist. An action defines something that has occurred such as a purchase or a
sign up. A state change defines a change in one or more properties on the
object such as name or favorite color. An Event also includes a microsecond
resolution timestamp that shows when it occurred.
Events for an object are grouped together into a Path. An object only has one path although a path can be sliced into one or more subpaths. An example of a subpath would be a session on a web site where a user might view several web pages at a time with a certain minimum idle time between visits.
An Object has a 64-bit positive integer identifier that can be correlated to a source system's primary key. By traversing the events within an object's path, the object's state can be rebuilt for any given point in time. This also means that actions can be queried based on the state of an object at the time they occurred.
More than anything the Sky server is built around simplicity. This is reflected in the code that is written as well as the features that are added. Complexity can be offloaded to an external language on a per case basis.
Sky is a young project but this road map is meant to provide an overview of where it is headed. The following is what is coming up:
- Multi-Threaded Server - Daemon server for production use.
- Write Ahead Log - Periodically write events to the database to improve write performance.
- Cache - Cache paths in memory for active objects.
- Real-Time Queries - Adjust query results in real time as events come in.
- Plug-ins - Allow external code to be used to process event data for things such as machine learning.
- Distribution - Distribute paths across multiple machines with built-in sharding and failover.
If you'd like to contribute to Sky, please fork the repo on GitHub:
https://github.com/skylandlabs/sky
You're also welcome to discuss the project on the mailing list by sending an e-mail to [email protected].