18,907 research outputs found
A survey of parallel execution strategies for transitive closure and logic programs
An important feature of database technology of the nineties is the use of parallelism for speeding up the execution of complex queries. This technology is being tested in several experimental database architectures and a few commercial systems for conventional select-project-join queries. In particular, hash-based fragmentation is used to distribute data to disks under the control of different processors in order to perform selections and joins in parallel. With the development of new query languages, and in particular with the definition of transitive closure queries and of more general logic programming queries, the new dimension of recursion has been added to query processing. Recursive queries are complex; at the same time, their regular structure is particularly suited for parallel execution, and parallelism may give a high efficiency gain. We survey the approaches to parallel execution of recursive queries that have been presented in the recent literature. We observe that research on parallel execution of recursive queries is separated into two distinct subareas, one focused on the transitive closure of Relational Algebra expressions, the other one focused on optimization of more general Datalog queries. Though the subareas seem radically different because of the approach and formalism used, they have many common features. This is not surprising, because most typical Datalog queries can be solved by means of the transitive closure of simple algebraic expressions. We first analyze the relationship between the transitive closure of expressions in Relational Algebra and Datalog programs. We then review sequential methods for evaluating transitive closure, distinguishing iterative and direct methods. We address the parallelization of these methods, by discussing various forms of parallelization. Data fragmentation plays an important role in obtaining parallel execution; we describe hash-based and semantic fragmentation. Finally, we consider Datalog queries, and present general methods for parallel rule execution; we recognize the similarities between these methods and the methods reviewed previously, when the former are applied to linear Datalog queries. We also provide a quantitative analysis that shows the impact of the initial data distribution on the performance of methods
Exact Distance Oracles for Planar Graphs
We present new and improved data structures that answer exact node-to-node
distance queries in planar graphs. Such data structures are also known as
distance oracles. For any directed planar graph on n nodes with non-negative
lengths we obtain the following:
* Given a desired space allocation , we show how to
construct in time a data structure of size that answers
distance queries in time per query.
As a consequence, we obtain an improvement over the fastest algorithm for
k-many distances in planar graphs whenever .
* We provide a linear-space exact distance oracle for planar graphs with
query time for any constant eps>0. This is the first such data
structure with provable sublinear query time.
* For edge lengths at least one, we provide an exact distance oracle of space
such that for any pair of nodes at distance D the query time is
. Comparable query performance had been observed
experimentally but has never been explained theoretically.
Our data structures are based on the following new tool: given a
non-self-crossing cycle C with nodes, we can preprocess G in
time to produce a data structure of size that can
answer the following queries in time: for a query node u, output
the distance from u to all the nodes of C. This data structure builds on and
extends a related data structure of Klein (SODA'05), which reports distances to
the boundary of a face, rather than a cycle.
The best distance oracles for planar graphs until the current work are due to
Cabello (SODA'06), Djidjev (WG'96), and Fakcharoenphol and Rao (FOCS'01). For
and space , we essentially improve the query
time from to .Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM-SIAM Symposium on
Discrete Algorithms, SODA 201
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