Adding data provenance support to Apache Spark

Debugging data processing logic in data-intensive scalable computing (DISC) systems is a difficult and time-consuming effort. Today's DISC systems offer very little tooling for debugging programs, and as a result, programmers spend countless hours collecting evidence (e.g., from log files) and performing trial-and-error debugging. To aid this effort, we built Titian, a library that enables data provenance-tracking data through transformations-in Apache Spark. Data scientists using the Titian Spark extension will be able to quickly identify the input data at the root cause of a potential bug or outlier result. Titian is built directly into the Spark platform and offers data provenance support at interactive speeds-orders of magnitude faster than alternative solutions-while minimally impacting Spark job performance; observed overheads for capturing data lineage rarely exceed 30% above the baseline job execution time.