Apache Calcite: A Foundational Framework for Optimized Query Processing Over Heterogeneous Data Sources

Apache Calcite is a foundational software framework that provides query processing, optimization, and query language support to many popular open-source data processing systems such as Apache Hive, Apache Storm, Apache Flink, Druid, and MapD. Calcite's architecture consists of a modular and extensible query optimizer with hundreds of built-in optimization rules, a query processor capable of processing a variety of query languages, an adapter architecture designed for extensibility, and support for heterogeneous data models and stores (relational, semi-structured, streaming, and geospatial). This flexible, embeddable, and extensible architecture is what makes Calcite an attractive choice for adoption in big-data frameworks. It is an active project that continues to introduce support for the new types of data sources, query languages, and approaches to query processing and optimization.Comment: SIGMOD'1

Efficient Compute Node-Local Replication Mechanisms for NVRAM-Centric Data Structures

Non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) is about to hit the market and will require significant changes to the architecture of in-memory database systems. Since such hybrid DRAM-NVRAM database systems will keep the primary data solely persistent in the NVRAM, efficient replication mechanisms need to be considered to prevent data losses and to guarantee high availability in case of NVDIMM failures. In this paper, we argue for a software-based replication approach and present compute node-local mechanisms to provide the building blocks for an efficient NVRAM replication with a low latency and throughput penalty. Within our evaluation, we measured up to 10x less overhead for our optimized replication mechanisms compared to the basic replication mechanism of the Intel persistent memory development kit (PMDK)

VerdictDB: Universalizing Approximate Query Processing

Despite 25 years of research in academia, approximate query processing (AQP) has had little industrial adoption. One of the major causes of this slow adoption is the reluctance of traditional vendors to make radical changes to their legacy codebases, and the preoccupation of newer vendors (e.g., SQL-on-Hadoop products) with implementing standard features. Additionally, the few AQP engines that are available are each tied to a specific platform and require users to completely abandon their existing databases---an unrealistic expectation given the infancy of the AQP technology. Therefore, we argue that a universal solution is needed: a database-agnostic approximation engine that will widen the reach of this emerging technology across various platforms. Our proposal, called VerdictDB, uses a middleware architecture that requires no changes to the backend database, and thus, can work with all off-the-shelf engines. Operating at the driver-level, VerdictDB intercepts analytical queries issued to the database and rewrites them into another query that, if executed by any standard relational engine, will yield sufficient information for computing an approximate answer. VerdictDB uses the returned result set to compute an approximate answer and error estimates, which are then passed on to the user or application. However, lack of access to the query execution layer introduces significant challenges in terms of generality, correctness, and efficiency. This paper shows how VerdictDB overcomes these challenges and delivers up to 171$\times$ speedup (18.45$\times$ on average) for a variety of existing engines, such as Impala, Spark SQL, and Amazon Redshift, while incurring less than 2.6% relative error. VerdictDB is open-sourced under Apache License.Comment: Extended technical report of the paper that appeared in Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 1461-1476. ACM, 201

An experimental study of learned cardinality estimation

Cardinality estimation is a fundamental but long unresolved problem in query optimization. Recently, multiple papers from different research groups consistently report that learned models have the potential to replace existing cardinality estimators. In this thesis, we ask a forward-thinking question: Are we ready to deploy these learned cardinality models in production? Our study consists of three main parts. Firstly, we focus on the static environment (i.e., no data updates) and compare five new learned methods with eight traditional methods on four real-world datasets under a unified workload setting. The results show that learned models are indeed more accurate than traditional methods, but they often suffer from high training and inference costs. Secondly, we explore whether these learned models are ready for dynamic environments (i.e., frequent data updates). We find that they can- not catch up with fast data updates and return large errors for different reasons. For less frequent updates, they can perform better but there is no clear winner among themselves. Thirdly, we take a deeper look into learned models and explore when they may go wrong. Our results show that the performance of learned methods can be greatly affected by the changes in correlation, skewness, or domain size. More importantly, their behaviors are much harder to interpret and often unpredictable. Based on these findings, we identify two promising research directions (control the cost of learned models and make learned models trustworthy) and suggest a number of research opportunities. We hope that our study can guide researchers and practitioners to work together to eventually push learned cardinality estimators into real database systems

Make the most out of your SIMD investments: Counter control flow divergence in compiled query pipelines

Increasing single instruction multiple data (SIMD) capabilities in modern hardware allows for compiling efficient data-parallel query pipelines. This means GPU-alike challenges arise: control flow divergence causes underutilization of vector-processing units. In this paper, we present efficient algorithms for the AVX-512 architecture to address this issue. These algorithms allow for fine-grained assignment of new tuples to idle SIMD lanes. Furthermore, we present strategies for their integration with compiled query pipelines without introducing inefficient memory materializations. We evaluate our approach with a high-performance geospatial join query, which shows performance improvements of up to 35%

MapRDD : finer grained resilient distributed dataset for machine learning

The Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) is the core memory abstraction behind the popular data-analytic framework Apache Spark. We present an extension to the Resilient Distributed Dataset for map transformations, that we call MapRDD, which takes advantage of the underlying relations between records in the parent and child datasets, in order to achieve random-access of individual records in a partition. The design is complemented by a new MemoryStore, which manages data sampling and data transfers asynchronously. We use the ImageNet dataset to demonstrate that: (I) The initial data loading phase is redundant and can be completely avoided; (II) Sampling on the CPU can be entirely overlapped with training on the GPU to achieve near full occupancy; (III) CPU processing cycles and memory usage can be reduced by more than 90%, allowing other applications to be run simultaneously; (IV) Constant training step time can be achieved, regardless of the size of the partition, for up to 1.3 million records in our experiments. We expect to obtain the same improvements in other RDD transformations via further research on finer-grained implicit & explicit dataset relations