This paper provides an introduction to and discussion of SIGNAL, an industry-scale process data querying language and engine for large-scale cloud-based systems that is developed by SAP Signavio. SIGNAL is optimized for fast read access to process data in event log format and utilizes an in-memory columnar store to this end. To facilitate usability, SIGNAL uses an SQL-like syntax with additional domain-specific querying features and in particular row-pattern matching-based temporal operators. Also, the paper highlights research challenges related to process querying that are informed by the implementation and application of SIGNAL.

翻译：本文介绍并探讨了SIGNAL，一种由SAP Signavio开发的、面向大规模云系统的工业级流程数据查询语言与引擎。SIGNAL针对事件日志格式流程数据的快速读取访问进行了优化，并为此采用了内存列式存储。为提升易用性，SIGNAL使用类似SQL的语法，并附加领域特定的查询功能，特别是基于行模式匹配的时序运算符。此外，本文还基于SIGNAL的实现与应用，提出了流程查询领域的相关研究挑战。