Heuristics-based query optimisation for SPARQL

Query optimization in RDF Stores is a challenging problem as SPARQL queries typically contain many more joins than equivalent relational plans, and hence lead to a large join order search space. In such cases, cost-based query optimization often is not possible. One practical reason for this is that statistics typically are missing in web scale setting such as the Linked Open Datasets (LOD). The more profound reason is that due to the absence of schematic structure in RDF, join-hit ratio estimation requires complicated forms of correlated join statistics; and currently there are no methods to identify the relevant correlations beforehand. For this reason, the use of good heuristics is essential in SPARQL query optimization, even in the case that are partially used with cost-based statistics (i.e., hybrid query optimization). In this paper we describe a set of useful heuristics for SPARQL query optimizers. We present these in the context of a new Heuristic SPARQL Planner (HSP) that is capable of exploiting the syntactic and the structural variations of the triple patterns in a SPARQL query in order to choose an execution plan without the need of any cost model. For this, we define the variable graph and we show a reduction of the SPARQL query optimization problem to the maximum weight independent set problem. We implemented our planner on top of the MonetDB open source column-store and evaluated its effectiveness against the state-ofthe-art RDF-3X engine as well as comparing the plan quality with a relational (SQL) equivalent of the benchmarks

Querying the web of data with low latency: high performance distributed SPARQL processing and benchmarking

The Web of Data extends the World Wide Web (WWW) in a way that applications can understand information and cooperate with humans on complex tasks. The basis of performing complex tasks is low latency queries over the Web of Data. The large scale and distributed nature of the Web of Data have negative impacts on several critical factors for efficient query processing, including fast data transmission between datasets, predictable data distribution and statistics that summarise and describe certain patterns in the data. Moreover, it is common on the Web of Data that the same resource is identified by multiple URIs. This phenomenon, named co-reference, potentially increases the complexity of query processing, and makes it even harder to obtain accurate statistics. With the aforementioned challenges, it is not clear whether it is possible to achieve efficient queries on the Web of Data on a large scale.In this thesis, we explore techniques to improve the efficiency of querying the Web of Data on a large scale. More specifically, we investigate two typical scenarios on the Web of Data, which are: 1) the scenario in which all datasets provide detailed statistics that are possibly available on a large scale, and 2) the scenario in which co-reference is taken into account, and datasets’ statistics are not reliable. For each scenario we explore existing and novel optimisation techniques that are tailored for querying the Web of Data, as well as well developed techniques with careful adjustments.For the scenario with detailed statistics we provide a scheme that implements a statistics query optimisation approach that requires detailed statistics, and intensively exploits parallelism. We propose an efficient algorithm called Parallel Sub-query Identification () to increase the degree of parallelism. () breaks a SPARQL query into sub-queries that can be processed in parallel while not increasing network traffic. We combine with dynamic programming to produce query plans with both minimum costs and a fair degree of parallelism. Furthermore, we develop a mechanism that maximally exploits bandwidth and computing power of datasets. For the scenario having co-reference and without reliable statistics we provide a scheme that implements a dynamic query optimisation approach that takes co-reference into account, and utilises runtime statistics to elevate query efficiency even further. We propose a model called Virtual Graph to transform a query and all its co-referent siblings into a single query with pre-defined bindings. Virtual Graph reduces the large number of outgoing and incoming requests that is required to process co-referent queries individually. Moreover, Virtual Graph enables query optimisers to find the optimal plan with respect to all co-referent queries as a whole. () is used in this scheme as well but provides a higher degree of parallelism with the help of runtime statistics. A Minimum-Spanning-Tree-based algorithm is used in this scheme as a result of using runtime statistics. The same parallel execution mechanism used in the previous scenario is adopted here as well.In order to examine the effectiveness of our schemes in practice, we deploy the above approaches in two distributed SPARQL engines, LHD-s and LHD-d respectively. Both engines are implemented using a popular Java-based platform for building Semantic Web applications. They can be used as either standalone applications or integrated into existing systems that require quick response of Linked Data queries.We also propose a scalable and flexible benchmark, called Distributed SPARQL Evaluation Framework (DSEF), for evaluating optimisation approaches in the Web of Data. DSEF adopts a expandable virtual-machine-based structure and provides a set of efficient tools to help easily set up RDF networks of arbitrary sizes. We further investigate the proportion and distribution of co-reference in the real world, based on which DESF is able to simulate co-reference for given RDF datasets. DSEF bases its soundness in the usage of widely accepted assessment data and queries.By comparing both LHD-s and LHD-d with existing approaches using DSEF, we provide evidence that neither existing statistics provided by datasets nor cost estimation methods, are sufficiently accurate. On the other hand, dynamic optimisation using runtime statistics together with carefully tuned parallelism are promising for significantly reducing the latency of large scale queries on the Web of Data. We also demonstrate that () and Virtual Graph algorithms significantly increase query efficiency for queries with or without co-reference.In summary, the contributions of this these include: 1) proposing two schemes for improving query efficiency in two typical scenarios in the Web of Data; 2) providing implementations, named LHD-s and LHD-d, for the two schemes respectively; 3) proposing a scalable and flexible evaluation framework for distributed SPARQL engines called DSEF; and 4) showing evidence that runtime-statistics-based dynamic optimisation with parallelism are promising to reduce latency of Linked Data queries on a large scale

How Many and What Types of SPARQL Queries can be Answered through Zero-Knowledge Link Traversal?

The current de-facto way to query the Web of Data is through the SPARQL protocol, where a client sends queries to a server through a SPARQL endpoint. Contrary to an HTTP server, providing and maintaining a robust and reliable endpoint requires a significant effort that not all publishers are willing or able to make. An alternative query evaluation method is through link traversal, where a query is answered by dereferencing online web resources (URIs) at real time. While several approaches for such a lookup-based query evaluation method have been proposed, there exists no analysis of the types (patterns) of queries that can be directly answered on the live Web, without accessing local or remote endpoints and without a-priori knowledge of available data sources. In this paper, we first provide a method for checking if a SPARQL query (to be evaluated on a SPARQL endpoint) can be answered through zero-knowledge link traversal (without accessing the endpoint), and analyse a large corpus of real SPARQL query logs for finding the frequency and distribution of answerable and non-answerable query patterns. Subsequently, we provide an algorithm for transforming answerable queries to SPARQL-LD queries that bypass the endpoints. We report experimental results about the efficiency of the transformed queries and discuss the benefits and the limitations of this query evaluation method.Comment: Preprint of paper accepted for publication in the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC 2019