Many cloud-based data management and analytics systems support complex objects.
Dataflow platforms such as Spark and Flink allow programmers to manipulate sets
consisting of objects from a host programming language (often Java). Document databases
such as MongoDB make use of hierarchical interchange formats---most popularly JSON---
which embody a data model where individual records can themselves contain sets of
records. Systems such as Dremel and AsterixDB allow complex nesting of data structures …

… An experimental comparison of complex object implementations for big data systems. In
Proceedings of the 2017 … Across a variety of data management tasks, experimentally
compare the costs associated with various choices of complex object models and
implementations. … Sorting JSON objects has 5x-10x penalty compared to C++ solutions. …