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: h17f887786805b79d
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 5.3633784e-05
Overall Rank: 8,267 | 44.44%
DOI: 10.14778/3377369.3377381
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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
9,088	Texera: A System for Collaborative and Interactive Data Analytics Using Workflows	2024	VLDB	5.2258409e-05
9,546	Demonstration of Collaborative and Interactive Workflow-Based Data Analytics in Texera	2022	VLDB	5.1599253e-05
10,228	Towards Resource-adaptive Query Execution in Cloud Native Databases	2024	CIDR	5.054828e-05
11,432	ML-Asset Management: Curation, Discovery, and Utilization	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,462	IcedTea: Efficient and Responsive Time-Travel Debugging in Dataflow Systems	2025	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,554	Pasta: A Cost-Based Optimizer for Generating Pipelining Schedules for Dataflow DAGs	2024	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,734	Udon: Efficient Debugging of User-Defined Functions in Big Data Systems with Line-by-Line Control	2023	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,761	Fries: Fast and Consistent Runtime Reconfiguration in Dataflow Systems with Transactional Guarantees	2023	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,921	Machine Programming: Turning Data into Programmer Productivity	2022	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,122	Demonstration of Interactive Runtime Debugging of Distributed Dataflows in Texera	2020	VLDB	4.9769913e-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
1,564	Titian: Data Provenance Support in Spark	2016	VLDB	0.00010219222
3,034	Chi: A Scalable and Programmable Control Plane for Distributed Stream Processing Systems	2018	VLDB	7.7301387e-05
3,774	Query Suspend and Resume	2007	SIGMOD	7.026432e-05
5,575	Inspector Gadget: A Framework for Custom Monitoring and Debugging of Distributed Dataflows	2011	SIGMOD	6.0765269e-05
5,696	Debugging Big Data Analytics in Spark with BigDebug	2017	SIGMOD	6.030237e-05
5,719	Indexing in an Actor-Oriented Database	2017	CIDR	6.0162188e-05
8,358	Resumable Online Index Rebuild in SQL Server	2017	VLDB	5.3459276e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	5,696	Debugging Big Data Analytics in Spark with BigDebug	2017	SIGMOD
2	8,240	Challenges and Experience in Prototyping a Multi-Modal Stream Analytic and Monitoring Application on System S	2007	VLDB
3	13,875	Big Data Science Needs Big Data Middleware	2015	CIDR
4	5,719	Indexing in an Actor-Oriented Database	2017	CIDR
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8	11,462	IcedTea: Efficient and Responsive Time-Travel Debugging in Dataflow Systems	2025	VLDB
9	2,228	Spinning Fast Iterative Data Flows	2012	VLDB
10	12,122	Demonstration of Interactive Runtime Debugging of Distributed Dataflows in Texera	2020	VLDB