Graph Processing in Main-Memory Column Stores

Evermore, novel and traditional business applications leverage the advantages of a graph data model, such as the offered schema flexibility and an explicit representation of relationships between entities. As a consequence, companies are confronted with the challenge of storing, manipulating, and querying terabytes of graph data for enterprise-critical applications. Although these business applications operate on graph-structured data, they still require direct access to the relational data and typically rely on an RDBMS to keep a single source of truth and access. Existing solutions performing graph operations on business-critical data either use a combination of SQL and application logic or employ a graph data management system. For the first approach, relying solely on SQL results in poor execution performance caused by the functional mismatch between typical graph operations and the relational algebra. To the worse, graph algorithms expose a tremendous variety in structure and functionality caused by their often domain-specific implementations and therefore can be hardly integrated into a database management system other than with custom coding. Since the majority of these enterprise-critical applications exclusively run on relational DBMSs, employing a specialized system for storing and processing graph data is typically not sensible. Besides the maintenance overhead for keeping the systems in sync, combining graph and relational operations is hard to realize as it requires data transfer across system boundaries. A basic ingredient of graph queries and algorithms are traversal operations and are a fundamental component of any database management system that aims at storing, manipulating, and querying graph data. Well-established graph traversal algorithms are standalone implementations relying on optimized data structures. The integration of graph traversals as an operator into a database management system requires a tight integration into the existing database environment and a development of new components, such as a graph topology-aware optimizer and accompanying graph statistics, graph-specific secondary index structures to speedup traversals, and an accompanying graph query language. In this thesis, we introduce and describe GRAPHITE, a hybrid graph-relational data management system. GRAPHITE is a performance-oriented graph data management system as part of an RDBMS allowing to seamlessly combine processing of graph data with relational data in the same system. We propose a columnar storage representation for graph data to leverage the already existing and mature data management and query processing infrastructure of relational database management systems. At the core of GRAPHITE we propose an execution engine solely based on set operations and graph traversals. Our design is driven by the observation that different graph topologies expose different algorithmic requirements to the design of a graph traversal operator. We derive two graph traversal implementations targeting the most common graph topologies and demonstrate how graph-specific statistics can be leveraged to select the optimal physical traversal operator. To accelerate graph traversals, we devise a set of graph-specific, updateable secondary index structures to improve the performance of vertex neighborhood expansion. Finally, we introduce a domain-specific language with an intuitive programming model to extend graph traversals with custom application logic at runtime. We use the LLVM compiler framework to generate efficient code that tightly integrates the user-specified application logic with our highly optimized built-in graph traversal operators. Our experimental evaluation shows that GRAPHITE can outperform native graph management systems by several orders of magnitude while providing all the features of an RDBMS, such as transaction support, backup and recovery, security and user management, effectively providing a promising alternative to specialized graph management systems that lack many of these features and require expensive data replication and maintenance processes

modeling the locality in graph traversals

An increasing number of applications in physical and social sciences require the analysis of large graphs. The efficiency of these programs strongly depends on their memory usage especially the locality of graph data access. Intuitively, the locality in computation should reflect the locality in graph topology. Existing locality models, however, operate either at program level for regular loops and arrays or at trace level for arbitrary access streams. They are not sufficient to characterize the relation between locality and connectivity. This paper presents a new metrics called the vertex distance and uses it to model the locality in breadth-first graph traversal (BFS). It shows three models that use the average node degree and the edge distribution to predict the number of BFS levels and the reuse distance distribution of BFS. Finally, it evaluates the new models using random and non-random graphs. © 2012 IEEE.Int. Assoc. Comput. Commun. (IACC)An increasing number of applications in physical and social sciences require the analysis of large graphs. The efficiency of these programs strongly depends on their memory usage especially the locality of graph data access. Intuitively, the locality in computation should reflect the locality in graph topology. Existing locality models, however, operate either at program level for regular loops and arrays or at trace level for arbitrary access streams. They are not sufficient to characterize the relation between locality and connectivity. This paper presents a new metrics called the vertex distance and uses it to model the locality in breadth-first graph traversal (BFS). It shows three models that use the average node degree and the edge distribution to predict the number of BFS levels and the reuse distance distribution of BFS. Finally, it evaluates the new models using random and non-random graphs. © 2012 IEEE