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

MIL primitives for querying a fragmented world

In query-intensive database application areas, like decision support and data mining, systems that use vertical fragmentation have a significant performance advantage. In order to support relational or object oriented applications on top of such a fragmented data model, a flexible yet powerful intermediate language is needed. This problem has been successfully tackled in Monet, a modern extensible database kernel developed by our group. We focus on the design choices made in the Monet Interpreter Language (MIL), its algebraic query language, and outline how its concept of tactical optimization enhances and simplifies the optimization of complex queries. Finally, we summarize the experience gained in Monet by creating a highly efficient implementation of MIL

Extending a multi-set relational algebra to a parallel environment

Parallel database systems will very probably be the future for high-performance data-intensive applications. In the past decade, many parallel database systems have been developed, together with many languages and approaches to specify operations in these systems. A common background is still missing, however. This paper proposes an extended relational algebra for this purpose, based on the well-known standard relational algebra. The extended algebra provides both complete database manipulation language features, and data distribution and process allocation primitives to describe parallelism. It is defined in terms of multi-sets of tuples to allow handling of duplicates and to obtain a close connection to the world of high-performance data processing. Due to its algebraic nature, the language is well suited for optimization and parallelization through expression rewriting. The proposed language can be used as a database manipulation language on its own, as has been done in the PRISMA parallel database project, or as a formal basis for other languages, like SQL

On Parallel Join Processing in Object-Relational Database Systems

So far only few performance studies on parallel object-relational database systems are available. In particular, the relative performance of relational vs. reference-based join processing in a parallel environment has not been investigated sufficiently. We present a performance study based on the BUCKY benchmark to compare parallel join processing using reference attributes with relational hash- and merge-join algorithms. In addition, we propose a data allocation scheme especially suited for object hierarchies and set-valued attributes

Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language

Abstraction without regret refers to the vision of using high-level programming languages for systems development without experiencing a negative impact on performance. A database system designed according to this vision offers both increased productivity and high performance, instead of sacrificing the former for the latter as is the case with existing, monolithic implementations that are hard to maintain and extend. In this article, we realize this vision in the domain of analytical query processing. We present LegoBase, a query engine written in the high-level language Scala. The key technique to regain efficiency is to apply generative programming: LegoBase performs source-to-source compilation and optimizes the entire query engine by converting the high-level Scala code to specialized, low-level C code. We show how generative programming allows to easily implement a wide spectrum of optimizations, such as introducing data partitioning or switching from a row to a column data layout, which are difficult to achieve with existing low-level query compilers that handle only queries. We demonstrate that sufficiently powerful abstractions are essential for dealing with the complexity of the optimization effort, shielding developers from compiler internals and decoupling individual optimizations from each other. We evaluate our approach with the TPC-H benchmark and show that: (a) With all optimizations enabled, LegoBase significantly outperforms a commercial database and an existing query compiler. (b) Programmers need to provide just a few hundred lines of high-level code for implementing the optimizations, instead of complicated low-level code that is required by existing query compilation approaches. (c) The compilation overhead is low compared to the overall execution time, thus making our approach usable in practice for compiling query engines

A bloom-filter strategy for response time reduction in distributed query processing.

In distributed database systems, query optimization is to find strategies attempt to minimize the amount of data transmitted over the network. Optimization algorithms have an important impact on the performance of distributed query processing. Since optimal query processing in distributed database systems has been shown to be NP-Hard [WC96], heuristics are applied to find a cost-effective and efficient (but suboptimal) processing strategy. Many query optimization strategies have been proposed to minimize either the total cost or the response time. The approaches in distributed query processing have mainly focused on the use of joins, semijoins, and filters. In this thesis, we propose a new reduction strategy based on bloom-filters to significantly reduce the response time of a distributed query. This algorithm can process general queries consisting of an arbitrary number of relations and join attributes. The performance of the algorithm with respect to response time is compared against the Initial Feasible Solution (IFS). An amount of experimental results has been used to evaluate the performance of our algorithm. Compared to the IFS, our algorithm provides a significantly improved query solution. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2003 .G36. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-05, page: 1749. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2003

DOH: A Content Delivery Peer-to-Peer Network

Many SMEs and non-pro¯t organizations su®er when their Web servers become unavailable due to °ash crowd e®ects when their web site becomes popular. One of the solutions to the °ash-crowd problem is to place the web site on a scalable CDN (Content Delivery Network) that replicates the content and distributes the load in order to improve its response time. In this paper, we present our approach to building a scalable Web Hosting environment as a CDN on top of a structured peer-to-peer system of collaborative web-servers integrated to share the load and to improve the overall system performance, scalability, availability and robustness. Unlike clusterbased solutions, it can run on heterogeneous hardware, over geographically dispersed areas. To validate and evaluate our approach, we have developed a system prototype called DOH (DKS Organized Hosting) that is a CDN implemented on top of the DKS (Distributed K-nary Search) structured P2P system with DHT (Distributed Hash table) functionality [9]. The prototype is implemented in Java, using the DKS middleware, the Jetty web-server, and a modi¯ed JavaFTP server. The proposed design of CDN has been evaluated by simulation and by evaluation experiments on the prototype

Deductive Optimization of Relational Data Storage

Optimizing the physical data storage and retrieval of data are two key database management problems. In this paper, we propose a language that can express a wide range of physical database layouts, going well beyond the row- and column-based methods that are widely used in database management systems. We use deductive synthesis to turn a high-level relational representation of a database query into a highly optimized low-level implementation which operates on a specialized layout of the dataset. We build a compiler for this language and conduct experiments using a popular database benchmark, which shows that the performance of these specialized queries is competitive with a state-of-the-art in memory compiled database system

Implementation of composite semijoins using a variation of Bloom filters.

Different from a centralized database system, distributed query processing involves data transmission among different sites and this communication cost is a dominant factor compared to local processing cost. So, the objective of distributed query optimization is to find strategies to minimize the amount of data transmitted over the network. Since optimal query processing in distributed database systems has been shown to be an NP-hard problem, heuristics are applied to find a near-optimal processing strategy. Previous research has mainly focused on the use of joins, semijoins, and hash semijoins (Bloom filters). The semijoin is a commonly recognized operator, which provides efficient query results. As a variation of semijoin, the composite semijoin is beneficial to do semijoins as one composite rather than as multiple single column semijoins. The Hash semijoin (which uses a Bloom filter) is used to minimize the cost of a semijoin operation. This thesis report provides a summary of each category of query processing techniques and optimization algorithms. Also in this thesis, we propose a new algorithm called Composite Semijoin Filter by combining the idea of composite semijoins, Bloom filters and PERF joins. One of the advantages of this algorithm is to avoid collisions. The algorithm is evaluated and compared with initial feasible solution (IFS) and another filter-based algorithm. It has been shown that the algorithm gives substantial reduction on relations and the total cost.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .Z58. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-01, page: 0249. Adviser: Joan Morrissey. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

Qserv: a distributed shared-nothing database for the LSST catalog

The LSST project will provide public access to a database catalog that, in its final year, is estimated to include 26 billion stars and galaxies in dozens of trillion detections in multiple petabytes. Because we are not aware of an existing open-source database implementation that has been demonstrated to efficiently satisfy astronomers' spatial self-joining and cross-matching queries at this scale, we have implemented Qserv, a distributed shared-nothing SQL database query system. To speed development, Qserv relies on two successful open-source software packages: the MySQL RDBMS and the Xrootd distributed file system. We describe Qserv's design, architecture, and ability to scale to LSST's data requirements. We illustrate its potential with test results on a 150-node cluster using 55 billion rows and 30 terabytes of simulated data. These results demonstrate the soundness of Qserv's approach and the scale it achieves on today's hardware