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Fast pattern-matching library


Quamina implements a data type with APIs to create an instance and add multiple Patterns to it, and then query data objects called Events to discover which of the Patterns match the fields in the Event. In typical cases, Quamina can match millions of Events per second, even with many Patterns added to the instance.

Quamina has no run-time dependencies beyond built-in Go libraries.

Quamina welcomes contributions.

Status

This is version 1.5.1 of Quamina. In future, the API will be changed only additively.

Note that we have documented more APIs than are actually fully implemented, with the intent of showing direction.

Patterns

Consider the following JSON Event, taken from the example in RFC 8259:

{
  "Image": {
    "Width":  800,
    "Height": 600,
    "Title":  "View from 15th Floor",
    "Thumbnail": {
      "Url":    "http://www.example.com/image/481989943",
      "Height": 125,
      "Width":  100
    },
    "Animated" : false,
    "IDs": [116, 943, 234, 38793]
  }
}

The following Patterns would match it:

{"Image": {"Width": [800]}}

{
  "Image": {
    "Animated": [ false ],
    "Thumbnail": {
      "Height": [ 125 ]
    },
    "IDs": [ 943 ]
  }
}

{"Image": { "Title": [ { "exists": true } ] } }

{
  "Image":  {
    "Width": [800],
    "Title": [ { "exists": true } ],
    "Animated": [ false ]
  }
}

{"Image": { "Width": [800], "IDs": [ { "exists": true } ] } }

{"Foo": [ { "exists": false } ] }

{
  "Image": {
    "Thumbnail": { "Url": [ { "wildcard": "*9943" } ] }
  }
}

{
  "Image": {
    "Thumbnail": { "Url":
      [ { "wildcard": "http://www.example.com/*" } ] }
  }
}

{
  "Image": {
    "Thumbnail": { "Url":
      [ { "wildcard": "http://www.example.*/*9943" } ] }
  }
}

{
  "Image": {
    "Title": [ {"anything-but":  ["Pikachu", "Eevee"] } ]
  }
}

{
  "Image": {
    "Thumbnail": {
      "Url": [ "a", { "prefix": "https:" } ] }
  }
} 

{
  "Image": {
    "Title": [ { "equals-ignore-case": "VIEW FROM 15th FLOOR" } ] 
  }
}

The syntax and semantics of Patterns are fully specified in Patterns in Quamina.

The structure of a Pattern, in terms of field names and nesting, must be the same as the structure of the Event to be matched. The field values are always given as an array; if any element of the array matches the value in the Event, the match is good. If the field in the Event is array-valued, matching is true if the intersection of the arrays is non-empty.

Fields which are not mentioned in the Pattern will be assumed to match, but all fields mentioned must match. So the semantics are effectively an OR on each field's values, but an AND on the field names.

The "exists":true and "exists":false patterns have corner cases; details are covered in Patterns in Quamina.

Flattening and Matching

The first step in finding matches for an Event is “flattening” it, which is to say turning it into a list of pathname/value pairs called Fields. Quamina defines a Flattener interface type and has a built-in Flattener for JSON.

Note that should you wish to process Events in a format other than JSON, you can implement the Flattener interface yourself.

Data Errors

Note: Both Patterns and Events are required to be RFC 8259-conforming JSON. In particular, field names and values in both Patterns and Events must be valid UTF-8. Unescaped characters smaller than 0x1F (illegal per JSON), and bytes with value greater than 0XF4 (can't occur in correctly composed UTF-8) are rejected by the APIs.

In some cases, JSON errors in Events may not be caught by the Matching APIs. The Flattener works hard to avoid processing areas of the Event that cannot match any of the provided Patterns and, in skipping over them, may miss certain errors.

APIs

Control APIs

func New(opts ...Option) (*Quamina, error)

func WithMediaType(mediaType string) Option
func WithFlattener(f Flattener) Option
func WithPatternDeletion(b bool) Option
func WithPatternStorage(ps LivePatternsState) Option

For example:

q, err := quamina.New(quamina.WithMediaType("application/json"))

The meanings of the Option functions are:

WithMediaType: In the futue, Quamina will support Events not just in JSON but in other formats such as Avro, Protobufs, and so on. This option will make sure to invoke the correct Flattener. At the moment, the only supported value is application/json, the default.

WithFlattener: Requests that Quamina flatten Events with the provided (presumably user-written) Flattener.

WithPatternDeletion: If true, arranges that Quamina allows Patterns to be deleted from an instance. This is not free; it can incur extra costs in memory and occasional stop-the-world Quamina rebuilds. (We plan to improve this.)

WithPatternStorage: If you provide an argument that supports the LivePatternStorage API, Quamina will use it to maintain a list of which Patterns have currently been added but not deleted. This could be useful if you wanted to rebuild Quamina instances for sharded processing or after a system failure. Note: Not yet implemented.

Data APIs

func (q *Quamina) AddPattern(x X, patternJSON string) error

The first argument identifies the Pattern and will be returned by Quamina when asked to match against Events. X is defined as any.

The Pattern is provided in the second argument string which must be a JSON object as exemplified above in this document.

The error return is used to signal invalid Pattern structure, which could be bad UTF-8 or malformed JSON or leaf values which are not provided as arrays.

As many Patterns as desired can be added to a Quamina instance. More than one Pattern can be added with the same X identifier.

The AddPattern call is single-threaded; if multiple threads call it, they will block and execute sequentially.

func (q *Quamina) DeletePatterns(x X) error

After calling this API, no list of matches from AddPattern will include the X value specified in the argument.

The error return value is nil unless there was an internal failure of Quamina’s storage system.

func (q *Quamina) MatchesForEvent(event []byte) ([]X, error)

The error return value is nil unless there was an error in the encoding of the Event.

The []X return slice may be empty if none of the Patterns match the provided Event.

Concurrency

A single Quamina instance can not safely be used by multiple goroutines at the same time. However, the underlying data structure is designed for concurrent access and the Copy API is provided to support this.

func (q *Quamina) Copy() *Quamina

This generates a copy of the target instance. Such copies may safely run in parallel in different goroutines executing any combination of MatchesForEvent(), AddPattern(), and DeletePattern() calls. There is a significant performance penalty if a high proportion of these calls are AddPattern().

Note that the Copy() API is somewhat expensive, and that a Quamina instance exhibits “warm-up” behavior, i.e. the performance of MatchesForEvent() improves slightly upon repeated calls, especially over the first few calls. The conclusion is that, for maximum efficiency, once you’ve created a Quamina instance, whether through New() or Copy(), keep it around and run as many Events through it as is practical.

AddPattern() Performance

Tens of thousands of Patterns per second can be added to a Quamina instance; the in-memory data structure will become larger, but not unreasonably so. The amount of available memory is the only significant limit to the number of patterns an instance can carry.

MatchesForEvent() Performance

I used to say that the performance of MatchesForEvent was O(1) in the number of Patterns. That’s probably a reasonable way to think about it, because it’s almost right, except in the case where a very large number of wildcard patterns have been added; this is discussed in the next section.

To be correct, the performance is a little worse than O(N) where N is the average number of unique fields in an event that are used in one or more Patterns that have been added to the Quamina instance.

For example, suppose you have a list of 50,000 words, and you add a Pattern for each, of the form:

{"word": ["one of the words"]}

The performance in matching events should be about the same for one word or 50,000, with some marginal loss following on growth in the size of the necessary data structures.

However, adding another pattern that looks like the following, in the case that the Events have a top-level number field, would decrease the performance by a factor of roughly 2:

{"number": [11, 22, 33]}

After that, adding a few thousand more "number" patterns shouldn’t decrease the performance observably.

A word of explanation: Quamina compiles the Patterns into a somewhat-decorated automaton and uses that to find matches in Events. For Quamina to work, the incoming Events must be flattened into a list of pathname/value pairs and sorted. This process exceeds 50% of execution time, and is optimized by discarding any fields that do not appear in one or more of the Patterns added to Quamina. This code is optimized and in many cases can avoid processing every byte of the event. It’s complicated.

Once the list of fields which might match a Pattern is extracted, the cost of traversing the automaton is at most N, the number of fields left after discarding.

So, adding a new Pattern that only mentions fields which are already mentioned in previous Patterns is effectively free, i.e. O(1) in terms of run-time performance.

Quamina instances with large numbers of wildcard Patterns

A study of the theory of finite automata reveals that processing regular-expression constructs such as * increases the complexity of the automata necessary to match them. It develops that when a large number of such automata are compiled together, the merged output can contain a high degree of nondeterminism which can result in a drastic slowdown.

A fuzz test which adds a pattern for each of 12,959 5-letter words with one * embedded in each at a random offset slows matching speed down to below 10,000/second, in stark contrast to most Quamina instances, which can achieve millions of matches/second.

This slowdown is under active investigation and it is possible that the situation will improve.

Further documentation

There is a series of blog posts entitled Quamina Diary that provides a detailed discussion of the design decisions at a length unsuitable for in-code comments.

Name

From Wikipedia: Quamina Gladstone (1778 – 16 September 1823), most often referred to simply as Quamina, was a Guyanese slave from Africa and father of Jack Gladstone. He and his son were involved in the Demerara rebellion of 1823, one of the largest slave revolts in the British colonies before slavery was abolished.

Credits

@timbray: v0.0 and patches.

@jsmorph: Pruner and concurrency testing.

@embano1: CI/CD and project structure.

@yosiat: Flattening optimization.

@arnehormann: compact high-precision number representation.