Photon: Fault-tolerant and Scalable Joining of Continuous Data Streams

Summary: Photon: fault-tolerant, scalable joining of continuous streams across distributed data centers. Handles unordered or delayed streams with no duplicates (at-most-once) and progress toward exactly-once semantics; deployed in Google's Advertising System, delivering sub-10s latency for millions of events. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4681
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2013
Pagerank: 0.0001282373
Overall Rank: 1,286 | 91.06%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 19 of 19 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
288	Storm @Twitter	2014	SIGMOD	0.00028939871
824	Twitter Heron: Stream Processing at Scale	2015	SIGMOD	0.0001623129
1,577	PaxosStore: High-availability Storage Made Practical in WeChat	2017	VLDB	0.00011285777
1,613	Realtime Data Processing at Facebook	2016	SIGMOD	0.00011140777
1,794	Summingbird: A Framework for Integrating Batch and Online MapReduce Computations	2014	VLDB	0.00010532024
3,799	DPaxos: Managing Data Closer to Users for Low-Latency and Mobile Applications	2018	SIGMOD	6.7589543e-05
4,167	Scalable Distributed Stream Join Processing	2015	SIGMOD	6.3919506e-05
6,109	Pixida: Optimizing Data Parallel Jobs in Wide-Area Data Analytics	2016	VLDB	5.2059441e-05
6,436	Providing Streaming Joins as a Service at Facebook	2018	VLDB	5.0636254e-05
7,953	Shasta: Interactive Reporting At Scale	2016	SIGMOD	4.613363e-05
8,480	Optimization of Threshold Functions over Streams	2021	VLDB	4.5011552e-05
8,621	CLASH: A High-Level Abstraction for Optimized, Multi-Way Stream Joins over Apache Storm	2019	SIGMOD	4.4837361e-05
9,504	Supporting Scalable Analytics with Latency Constraints	2015	VLDB	4.3341665e-05
10,967	Low-Latency Adaptive Distributed Stream Join System Based on a Flexible Join Model	2024	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
11,485	Real-time Data Infrastructure at Uber	2021	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
11,625	InvaliDB: Scalable Push-Based Real-Time Queries on Top of Pull-Based Databases (Extended)	2020	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,805	CarStream: An Industrial System of Big Data Processing for Internet-of-Vehicles	2017	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,849	The Challenges of Global-scale Data Management	2016	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
12,003	Datacenters as Computers: Google Engineering & Database Research Perspectives	2014	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
189	Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services	2011	CIDR	0.00035925334
191	The Design of the Borealis Stream Processing Engine	2005	CIDR	0.00035738595
960	A Comparison of Join Algorithms for Log Processing in MapReduce	2010	SIGMOD	0.00015012242
985	Streaming Queries over Streaming Data	2002	VLDB	0.00014852471
1,306	Using Paxos to Build a Scalable, Consistent, and Highly Available Datastore	2011	VLDB	0.00012679179
1,694	How Soccer Players Would do Stream Joins	2011	SIGMOD	0.00010893764
1,717	Approximate Join Processing Over Data Streams	2003	SIGMOD	0.00010793312
2,763	Executing Stream Joins on the Cell Processor	2007	VLDB	8.1579306e-05
3,538	Database Tuning: principles, experiments, and troubleshooting techniques	2002	SIGMOD	6.995825e-05

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Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,388	Analytics in Motion: High Performance Event-Processing AND Real-Time Analytics in the Same Database	2015	SIGMOD	7.1571148e-05
1,357	Highly Available, Fault-Tolerant, Parallel Dataflows	2004	SIGMOD	0.00012392275
9,953	Distributed Stream KNN Join	2021	SIGMOD	4.2405999e-05
11,890	Let's Rethink Join Optimization in Distributed Systems	2015	CIDR	4.1945683e-05
1,613	Realtime Data Processing at Facebook	2016	SIGMOD	0.00011140777
3,382	Scalable and Adaptive Online Joins	2014	VLDB	7.1597145e-05
4,132	Advanced Join Strategies for Large-Scale Distributed Computation	2014	VLDB	6.4241067e-05
10,967	Low-Latency Adaptive Distributed Stream Join System Based on a Flexible Join Model	2024	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
4,167	Scalable Distributed Stream Join Processing	2015	SIGMOD	6.3919506e-05
6,436	Providing Streaming Joins as a Service at Facebook	2018	VLDB	5.0636254e-05