Data fragmentation for parallel transitive closure strategies

Addresses the problem of fragmenting a relation to make the parallel computation of the transitive closure efficient, based on the disconnection set approach. To better understand this design problem, the authors focus on transportation networks. These are characterized by loosely interconnected clusters of nodes with a high internal connectivity rate. Three requirements that have to be fulfilled by a fragmentation are formulated, and three different fragmentation strategies are presented, each emphasizing one of these requirements. Some test results are presented to show the performance of the various fragmentation strategie

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

Implementation and Performance Evaluation of a Parallel Transitive Closure Algorithms on PRISMA/DB

This paper is one of the first to discuss actual implementation of and experimentation with parallel transitive closure operations on a full-fledged relational database system. It brings two research efforts together; the development of an efficient execution strategy for parallel computation of path problems, called Disconnection Set Approach, and the development and implementation of a parallel, main-memory DBMS, called PRISMA/DB. First, we report on the implementation of the disconnection set approach on PRISMA/DB, showing how the latter's design allowed us to easily extend the functionality of the system. Second, we investigate the disconnection set approach's parallel behavior and performance by means of extensive experimentation. It is shown that the parallel implementation of the disconnection set approach yields very good performance characteristics, and that (super)linear speedup w.r.t. a special implementation of semi-naive is achieved for regular, so-called linear fragmenta..

Complex transitive closure queries on a fragmented graph

In this paper we study the reformulation of transitive closure queries on a fragmented graph. We split a query into several subqueries, each requiring only a fragment of the graph. We prove this reformulation to be correct for shortest path and bill of material queries. Here we describe the reformulation for an abstract graph, elsewhere we have described an actual implementation of our approach and some promising simulation results.\ud \ud We view the study of distributed computation of transitive closure queries as a result of the trend towards distributed computation. First selections were distributed to fragments of a relation, then fragmentation was used to compute joins in a distributed way, and now we are studying distributed computation of transitive closure queries. This should result in a deeper insight into the use and possible benefit of parallelism. Our work may be used in ordinary distributed databases as well as advanced multiprocessor database machines, such as PRISMA.\ud \ud Although this research was started to efficiently use distributed computation, it turns out to be beneficiary in a central environment as well. This is due to the introduction of extra selections, stemming from an appropriate fragmentation. This leads to extra focus on relevant data

Algebraic optimization of recursive queries

Over the past few years, much attention has been paid to deductive databases. They offer a logic-based interface, and allow formulation of complex recursive queries. However, they do not offer appropriate update facilities, and do not support existing applications. To overcome these problems an SQL-like interface is required besides a logic-based interface.\ud \ud In the PRISMA project we have developed a tightly-coupled distributed database, on a multiprocessor machine, with two user interfaces: SQL and PRISMAlog. Query optimization is localized in one component: the relational query optimizer. Therefore, we have defined an eXtended Relational Algebra that allows recursive query formulation and can also be used for expressing executable schedules, and we have developed algebraic optimization strategies for recursive queries. In this paper we describe an optimization strategy that rewrites regular (in the context of formal grammars) mutually recursive queries into standard Relational Algebra and transitive closure operations. We also describe how to push selections into the resulting transitive closure operations.\ud \ud The reason we focus on algebraic optimization is that, in our opinion, the new generation of advanced database systems will be built starting from existing state-of-the-art relational technology, instead of building a completely new class of systems

LiteMat: a scalable, cost-efficient inference encoding scheme for large RDF graphs

The number of linked data sources and the size of the linked open data graph keep growing every day. As a consequence, semantic RDF services are more and more confronted with various "big data" problems. Query processing in the presence of inferences is one them. For instance, to complete the answer set of SPARQL queries, RDF database systems evaluate semantic RDFS relationships (subPropertyOf, subClassOf) through time-consuming query rewriting algorithms or space-consuming data materialization solutions. To reduce the memory footprint and ease the exchange of large datasets, these systems generally apply a dictionary approach for compressing triple data sizes by replacing resource identifiers (IRIs), blank nodes and literals with integer values. In this article, we present a structured resource identification scheme using a clever encoding of concepts and property hierarchies for efficiently evaluating the main common RDFS entailment rules while minimizing triple materialization and query rewriting. We will show how this encoding can be computed by a scalable parallel algorithm and directly be implemented over the Apache Spark framework. The efficiency of our encoding scheme is emphasized by an evaluation conducted over both synthetic and real world datasets.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

A Generalization of Band Joins and the Merge-Purge Problem

The problem of merging multiple databases of information about common entities is frequently encountered in large commercial and government organizations. The problem we study is often called the Merge/Purge problem and is difficult to solve both in scale and accuracy. Large repositories of data always have numerous duplicate information entries about the same entities that are difficult to cull together without an intelligent "equational theory" that identifies equivalent items by a complex, domain dependent matching process. We have developed a system for accomplishing this task for lists of names of potential customers in a direct marketing-type application. Our results for statistically generated data are shown to be accurate and effective when processing the data multiple times using different keys for sorting. The system provides a rule programming module that is easy to program and quite good at finding duplicates especially in an environment with massive amounts of data

A Hierarchical Path View Model for Path Finding in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Effective path finding has been identified as an important requirement for dynamic route guidance in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Path finding is most efficient if the all-pair (shortest) paths are precomputed because path search requires only simple lookups of the precomputed path views. Such an approach however incurs path view maintenance (computation and update) and storage costs which can be unrealistically high for large ITS networks. To lower these costs, we propose a Hierarchical Path View Model (HPVM) that partitions an ITS road map, and then creates a hierarchical structure based on the road type classification. HPVM includes a map partition algorithm for creating the hierarchy, path view maintenance algorithms, and a heuristic hierarchical path finding algorithm that searches paths by traversing the hierarchy. HPVM captures the dynamicity of traffic change patterns better than the ITS path finding systems that use the hierarchical A * approach because: (1) during path search, HPVM traverses the hierarchy by dynamically selecting the connection points between two levels based on up-to-date traffic, and (2) HPVM can reroute the high-speed road traffic through local streets if needed. In this paper, we also present experimental results used to benchmark HPVM and to compare HPVM with alternative ITS path finding approaches, using both synthetic and real ITS maps that include a large Detroit map (> 28,000 nodes). The results show that the HPVM incurs much lower costs in path view maintenance and storage than the non-hierarchical path precomputation approach, and is more efficient in path search than the traditional ITS path finding using A * or hierarchical A * algorithms.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45593/1/10707_2004_Article_142477.pd