Amber: A Debuggable Dataflow System Based on the Actor Model

Summary: Amber is a debuggable dataflow system on the actor model for live in-flight analytics debugging. Pause, inspect state, modify and resume tasks, and set conditional breakpoints; Orleans-based implementation that demonstrates strong performance. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12459
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 5.4890583e-05
Overall Rank: 8,090 | 44.50%
DOI: 10.14778/3377369.3377381

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Avinash Kumar (University of California Irvine)
2. Zuozhi Wang (University of California Irvine)
3. Shengquan Ni (University of California Irvine)
4. Chen Li (University of California Irvine)

BibTeX Citation

@article{kumar_vldb20,
        title = {{Amber: A Debuggable Dataflow System Based on the Actor Model}},
        author = {Kumar, Avinash and Wang, Zuozhi and Ni, Shengquan and Li, Chen},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '20},
        volume = {13},
        number = {5},
        pages = {740--753},
        doi = {10.14778/3377369.3377381},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3377369.3377381},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,916	Texera: A System for Collaborative and Interactive Data Analytics Using Workflows	2024	VLDB	5.3483178e-05
9,361	Demonstration of Collaborative and Interactive Workflow-Based Data Analytics in Texera	2022	VLDB	5.2808574e-05
10,039	Towards Resource-adaptive Query Execution in Cloud Native Databases	2024	CIDR	5.1723558e-05
11,066	ML-Asset Management: Curation, Discovery, and Utilization	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,106	IcedTea: Efficient and Responsive Time-Travel Debugging in Dataflow Systems	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,207	Pasta: A Cost-Based Optimizer for Generating Pipelining Schedules for Dataflow DAGs	2024	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,414	Udon: Efficient Debugging of User-Defined Functions in Big Data Systems with Line-by-Line Control	2023	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,443	Fries: Fast and Consistent Runtime Reconfiguration in Dataflow Systems with Transactional Guarantees	2023	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,607	Machine Programming: Turning Data into Programmer Productivity	2022	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,814	Demonstration of Interactive Runtime Debugging of Distributed Dataflows in Texera	2020	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,617	Titian: Data Provenance Support in Spark	2016	VLDB	0.00010209397
3,117	Chi: A Scalable and Programmable Control Plane for Distributed Stream Processing Systems	2018	VLDB	7.7382559e-05
3,707	Query Suspend and Resume	2007	SIGMOD	7.1818056e-05
5,442	Inspector Gadget: A Framework for Custom Monitoring and Debugging of Distributed Dataflows	2011	SIGMOD	6.2184416e-05
5,570	Debugging Big Data Analytics in Spark with BigDebug	2017	SIGMOD	6.1693312e-05
5,607	Indexing in an Actor-Oriented Database	2017	CIDR	6.1520776e-05
8,194	Resumable Online Index Rebuild in SQL Server	2017	VLDB	5.469529e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	5,570	Debugging Big Data Analytics in Spark with BigDebug	2017	SIGMOD
2	8,081	Challenges and Experience in Prototyping a Multi-Modal Stream Analytic and Monitoring Application on System S	2007	VLDB
3	13,557	Big Data Science Needs Big Data Middleware	2015	CIDR
4	5,607	Indexing in an Actor-Oriented Database	2017	CIDR
5	7,082	REEF: Retainable Evaluator Execution Framework	2013	VLDB
6	4,845	Explaining Outputs in Modern Data Analytics	2016	VLDB
7	8,874	Stateful Entities: Object-oriented Cloud Applications as Distributed Dataflows	2023	CIDR
8	11,106	IcedTea: Efficient and Responsive Time-Travel Debugging in Dataflow Systems	2025	VLDB
9	2,196	Spinning Fast Iterative Data Flows	2012	VLDB
10	11,814	Demonstration of Interactive Runtime Debugging of Distributed Dataflows in Texera	2020	VLDB