10381 Summary and Abstracts Collection -- Robust Query Processing

Dagstuhl seminar 10381 on robust query processing (held 19.09.10 - 24.09.10) brought together a diverse set of researchers and practitioners with a broad range of expertise for the purpose of fostering discussion and collaboration regarding causes, opportunities, and solutions for achieving robust query processing. The seminar strove to build a unified view across the loosely-coupled system components responsible for the various stages of database query processing. Participants were chosen for their experience with database query processing and, where possible, their prior work in academic research or in product development towards robustness in database query processing. In order to pave the way to motivate, measure, and protect future advances in robust query processing, seminar 10381 focused on developing tests for measuring the robustness of query processing. In these proceedings, we first review the seminar topics, goals, and results, then present abstracts or notes of some of the seminar break-out sessions. We also include, as an appendix, the robust query processing reading list that was collected and distributed to participants before the seminar began, as well as summaries of a few of those papers that were contributed by some participants

INVESTIGATING THE STAR SCHEMA BENCHMARK AS A REPLACEMENT FOR THE TPC-H DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

Decision Support System (DSS) are at the core of business intelligence systems. Implementation costs for enterprise level Database Management System (DBMS) and DSS average $10,461 for installation costs. This does not include costs associated with database migrations or testing, which can double the cost, nor does this quoted price include the cost of yearly licensing or support agreements. Depending on the software vendor, there may be additional costs associated with using an application cluster, logical and virtual partitioning, data guards, and even costs per processor core. It is easy to see how the cost of operating a database server can grow expensive rapidly. Information Technology (IT) decision makers and software architects need the ability to choose a DBMS to suit their application's needs. To choose the correct DBMS solution a comprehensive and adaptive benchmark is needed. This benchmark must be capable of predicting how the performance of a given system will scale, as well as offer an estimation of cost. A problematic benchmark that is unable to accurately predict these values is worthless and leads to costly software decision mistakes. To continue to be successful and remain competitive in a given industry it is important for organizations to know their customers, target and acquire new markets, and look to future trends. This is where database business intelligence and decision support systems become useful. DSS allow users to data mine critical information about their work-flows, sales history and trends and have the data readily available so that they may make informed decisions and plan future growth. Business intelligence tools and decision support systems provide executive officers and members of management, the tools needed to create complex ad-hoc queries and mine important data. Presently, IT decision makers and software engineers use the TPC-H decision sup- port system benchmark as a guide to determining the optimal hardware and database vendor configurations to utilize for their decision support system. The TPC-H benchmark is a popular decision support system benchmark. In recent years, however, TPC-H has become heavily criticized for its many problems. The issues outlined within this thesis can lead IT decision makers to purchase and implement improper hardware and software solutions. This thesis examines the criticisms and issues of the TPC-H benchmark. Utilizing Amazon Web Services cloud computing power, we evaluate the Star Schema Benchmark (SSB), as an alternative to TPC-H. We successfully identify and demonstrate several previously undefined problems in the TPC-H benchmark. Our results conclude that the SSB not only resolves the issues inherent in TPC-H, and should serve as a replacement for TPC-H

Layout Optimization for Distributed Relational Databases Using Machine Learning

A common problem when running Web-based applications is how to scale-up the database. The solution to this problem usually involves having a smart Database Administrator determine how to spread the database tables out amongst computers that will work in parallel. Laying out database tables across multiple machines so they can act together as a single efficient database is hard. Automated methods are needed to help eliminate the time required for database administrators to create optimal configurations. There are four operators that we consider that can create a search space of possible database layouts: 1) denormalizing, 2) horizontally partitioning, 3) vertically partitioning, and 4) fully replicating. Textbooks offer general advice that is useful for dealing with extreme cases - for instance you should fully replicate a table if the level of insert to selects is close to zero. But even this seemingly obvious statement is not necessarily one that will lead to a speed up once you take into account that some nodes might be a bottle neck. There can be complex interactions between the 4 different operators which make it even more difficult to predict what the best thing to do is. Instead of using best practices to do database layout, we need a system that collects empirical data on when these 4 different operators are effective. We have implemented a state based search technique to try different operators, and then we used the empirically measured data to see if any speed up occurred. We recognized that the costs of creating the physical database layout are potentially large, but it is necessary since we want to know the Ground Truth about what is effective and under what conditions. After creating a dataset where these four different operators have been applied to make different databases, we can employ machine learning to induce rules to help govern the physical design of the database across an arbitrary number of computer nodes. This learning process, in turn, would allow the database placement algorithm to get better over time as it trains over a set of examples. What this algorithm calls for is that it will try to learn 1) What is a good database layout for a particular application given a query workload? and 2) Can this algorithm automatically improve itself in making recommendations by using machine learned rules to try to generalize when it makes sense to apply each of these operators? There has been considerable research done in parallelizing databases where large amounts of data are shipped from one node to another to answer a single query. Sometimes the costs of shipping the data back and forth might be high, so in this work we assume that it might be more efficient to create a database layout where each query can be answered by a single node. To make this assumption requires that all the incoming query templates are known beforehand. This requirement can easily be satisfied in the case of a Web-based application due to the characteristic that users typically interact with the system through a web interface such as web forms. In this case, unseen queries are not necessarily answerable, without first possibly reconstructing the data on a single machine. Prior knowledge of these exact query templates allows us to select the best possible database table placements across multiple nodes. But in the case of trying to improve the efficiency of a Web-based application, a web site provider might feel that they are willing to suffer the inconvenience of not being able to answer an arbitrary query, if they are in turn provided with a system that runs more efficiently

Hardware-conscious query processing for the many-core era

Die optimale Nutzung von moderner Hardware zur Beschleunigung von Datenbank-Anfragen ist keine triviale Aufgabe. Viele DBMS als auch DSMS der letzten Jahrzehnte basieren auf Sachverhalten, die heute kaum noch Gültigkeit besitzen. Ein Beispiel hierfür sind heutige Server-Systeme, deren Hauptspeichergröße im Bereich mehrerer Terabytes liegen kann und somit den Weg für Hauptspeicherdatenbanken geebnet haben. Einer der größeren letzten Hardware Trends geht hin zu Prozessoren mit einer hohen Anzahl von Kernen, den sogenannten Manycore CPUs. Diese erlauben hohe Parallelitätsgrade für Programme durch Multithreading sowie Vektorisierung (SIMD), was die Anforderungen an die Speicher-Bandbreite allerdings deutlich erhöht. Der sogenannte High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) versucht diese Lücke zu schließen, kann aber ebenso wie Many-core CPUs jeglichen Performance-Vorteil negieren, wenn dieser leichtfertig eingesetzt wird. Diese Arbeit stellt die Many-core CPU-Architektur zusammen mit HBM vor, um Datenbank sowie Datenstrom-Anfragen zu beschleunigen. Es wird gezeigt, dass ein hardwarenahes Kostenmodell zusammen mit einem Kalibrierungsansatz die Performance verschiedener Anfrageoperatoren verlässlich vorhersagen kann. Dies ermöglicht sowohl eine adaptive Partitionierungs und Merge-Strategie für die Parallelisierung von Datenstrom-Anfragen als auch eine ideale Konfiguration von Join-Operationen auf einem DBMS. Nichtsdestotrotz ist nicht jede Operation und Anwendung für die Nutzung einer Many-core CPU und HBM geeignet. Datenstrom-Anfragen sind oft auch an niedrige Latenz und schnelle Antwortzeiten gebunden, welche von höherer Speicher-Bandbreite kaum profitieren können. Hinzu kommen üblicherweise niedrigere Taktraten durch die hohe Kernzahl der CPUs, sowie Nachteile für geteilte Datenstrukturen, wie das Herstellen von Cache-Kohärenz und das Synchronisieren von parallelen Thread-Zugriffen. Basierend auf den Ergebnissen dieser Arbeit lässt sich ableiten, welche parallelen Datenstrukturen sich für die Verwendung von HBM besonders eignen. Des Weiteren werden verschiedene Techniken zur Parallelisierung und Synchronisierung von Datenstrukturen vorgestellt, deren Effizienz anhand eines Mehrwege-Datenstrom-Joins demonstriert wird.Exploiting the opportunities given by modern hardware for accelerating query processing speed is no trivial task. Many DBMS and also DSMS from past decades are based on fundamentals that have changed over time, e.g., servers of today with terabytes of main memory capacity allow complete avoidance of spilling data to disk, which has prepared the ground some time ago for main memory databases. One of the recent trends in hardware are many-core processors with hundreds of logical cores on a single CPU, providing an intense degree of parallelism through multithreading as well as vectorized instructions (SIMD). Their demand for memory bandwidth has led to the further development of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to overcome the memory wall. However, many-core CPUs as well as HBM have many pitfalls that can nullify any performance gain with ease. In this work, we explore the many-core architecture along with HBM for database and data stream query processing. We demonstrate that a hardware-conscious cost model with a calibration approach allows reliable performance prediction of various query operations. Based on that information, we can, therefore, come to an adaptive partitioning and merging strategy for stream query parallelization as well as finding an ideal configuration of parameters for one of the most common tasks in the history of DBMS, join processing. However, not all operations and applications can exploit a many-core processor or HBM, though. Stream queries optimized for low latency and quick individual responses usually do not benefit well from more bandwidth and suffer from penalties like low clock frequencies of many-core CPUs as well. Shared data structures between cores also lead to problems with cache coherence as well as high contention. Based on our insights, we give a rule of thumb which data structures are suitable to parallelize with focus on HBM usage. In addition, different parallelization schemas and synchronization techniques are evaluated, based on the example of a multiway stream join operation

Query execution in column-oriented database systems

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-148).There are two obvious ways to map a two-dimension relational database table onto a one-dimensional storage interface: store the table row-by-row, or store the table column-by-column. Historically, database system implementations and research have focused on the row-by row data layout, since it performs best on the most common application for database systems: business transactional data processing. However, there are a set of emerging applications for database systems for which the row-by-row layout performs poorly. These applications are more analytical in nature, whose goal is to read through the data to gain new insight and use it to drive decision making and planning. In this dissertation, we study the problem of poor performance of row-by-row data layout for these emerging applications, and evaluate the column-by-column data layout opportunity as a solution to this problem. There have been a variety of proposals in the literature for how to build a database system on top of column-by-column layout. These proposals have different levels of implementation effort, and have different performance characteristics. If one wanted to build a new database system that utilizes the column-by-column data layout, it is unclear which proposal to follow. This dissertation provides (to the best of our knowledge) the only detailed study of multiple implementation approaches of such systems, categorizing the different approaches into three broad categories, and evaluating the tradeoffs between approaches. We conclude that building a query executer specifically designed for the column-by-column query layout is essential to archive good performance. Consequently, we describe the implementation of C-Store, a new database system with a storage layer and query executer built for column-by-column data layout. We introduce three new query execution techniques that significantly improve performance. First, we look at the problem of integrating compression and execution so that the query executer is capable of directly operating on compressed data. This improves performance by improving I/O (less data needs to be read off disk), and CPU (the data need not be decompressed). We describe our solution to the problem of executer extensibility - how can new compression techniques be added to the system without having to rewrite the operator code? Second, we analyze the problem of tuple construction (stitching together attributes from multiple columns into a row-oriented "tuple").(cont.) Tuple construction is required when operators need to access multiple attributes from the same tuple; however, if done at the wrong point in a query plan, a significant performance penalty is paid. We introduce an analytical model and some heuristics to use that help decide when in a query plan tuple construction should occur. Third, we introduce a new join technique, the "invisible join" that improves performance of a specific type of join that is common in the applications for which column-by-column data layout is a good idea. Finally, we benchmark performance of the complete C-Store database system against other column-oriented database system implementation approaches, and against row-oriented databases. We benchmark two applications. The first application is a typical analytical application for which column-by-column data layout is known to outperform row-by-row data layout. The second application is another emerging application, the Semantic Web, for which column-oriented database systems are not currently used. We find that on the first application, the complete C-Store system performed 10 to 18 times faster than alternative column-store implementation approaches, and 6 to 12 times faster than a commercial database system that uses a row-by-row data layout. On the Semantic Web application, we find that C-Store outperforms other state-of-the-art data management techniques by an order of magnitude, and outperforms other common data management techniques by almost two orders of magnitude. Benchmark queries, which used to take multiple minutes to execute, can now be answered in several seconds.by Daniel J. Abadi.Ph.D

Linked Open Data - Creating Knowledge Out of Interlinked Data: Results of the LOD2 Project

Database Management; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Information Systems and Communication Servic

Preprocessing Solutions for Telecommunication Specific Big Data Use Cases

Big data is becoming important in mobile data analytics. The increase of networked devices and applications means that more data is being collected than ever before. All this has led to an explosion of data which is providing new opportunities to business and science. Data analysis can be divided in two steps, namely preprocessing and actual processing. Successful analysis requires advanced preprocessing capabilities. Functional needs for preprocessing include support of many data types and integration to many systems, fit for both off-line and on-line data analysis, filtering out unnecessary information, handling missing data, anonymization, and merging multiple data sets together. As a part of the thesis, 20 experts were interviewed to shed understanding on big data, its use cases, data preprocessing, feature requirements and available tools. This thesis investigates on what is big data, and how the organizations, especially telecommunications industry can gain benefit out of it. Furthermore, preprocessing as a part of value chain is presented and the preprocessing requirements are sorted. Finally, The available data analysis tools are surveyed and tested to find out the most suitable preprocessing solution. This study presents two findings as results. Firstly, it identifies the potential big data use cases and corresponding functional requirements for telecom industry based on literature review and conducted interviews. Secondly, this study distinguishes two most promising tools for big data preprocessing based on the functional requirements, preliminary testing and hands-on testing