A New Framework for Join Product Skew

Different types of data skew can result in load imbalance in the context of parallel joins under the shared nothing architecture. We study one important type of skew, join product skew (JPS). A static approach based on frequency classes is proposed which takes for granted the data distribution of join attribute values. It comes from the observation that the join selectivity can be expressed as a sum of products of frequencies of the join attribute values. As a consequence, an appropriate assignment of join sub-tasks, that takes into consideration the magnitude of the frequency products can alleviate the join product skew. Motivated by the aforementioned remark, we propose an algorithm, called Handling Join Product Skew (HJPS), to handle join product skew

Massively Parallel Sort-Merge Joins in Main Memory Multi-Core Database Systems

Two emerging hardware trends will dominate the database system technology in the near future: increasing main memory capacities of several TB per server and massively parallel multi-core processing. Many algorithmic and control techniques in current database technology were devised for disk-based systems where I/O dominated the performance. In this work we take a new look at the well-known sort-merge join which, so far, has not been in the focus of research in scalable massively parallel multi-core data processing as it was deemed inferior to hash joins. We devise a suite of new massively parallel sort-merge (MPSM) join algorithms that are based on partial partition-based sorting. Contrary to classical sort-merge joins, our MPSM algorithms do not rely on a hard to parallelize final merge step to create one complete sort order. Rather they work on the independently created runs in parallel. This way our MPSM algorithms are NUMA-affine as all the sorting is carried out on local memory partitions. An extensive experimental evaluation on a modern 32-core machine with one TB of main memory proves the competitive performance of MPSM on large main memory databases with billions of objects. It scales (almost) linearly in the number of employed cores and clearly outperforms competing hash join proposals - in particular it outperforms the "cutting-edge" Vectorwise parallel query engine by a factor of four.Comment: VLDB201

PF-OLA: A High-Performance Framework for Parallel On-Line Aggregation

Online aggregation provides estimates to the final result of a computation during the actual processing. The user can stop the computation as soon as the estimate is accurate enough, typically early in the execution. This allows for the interactive data exploration of the largest datasets. In this paper we introduce the first framework for parallel online aggregation in which the estimation virtually does not incur any overhead on top of the actual execution. We define a generic interface to express any estimation model that abstracts completely the execution details. We design a novel estimator specifically targeted at parallel online aggregation. When executed by the framework over a massive $8\text{TB}$ TPC-H instance, the estimator provides accurate confidence bounds early in the execution even when the cardinality of the final result is seven orders of magnitude smaller than the dataset size and without incurring overhead.Comment: 36 page

A Classification of Skew Effects in Parallel Database Systems

Skew effects are a serious problem in parallel database systems, but the relationship between different skew types and load balancing methods is still not fully understood. We develop and compare two classifications of skew effects and load balancing strategies, respectively, to match their relevant properties. Our conclusions highlight the importance of highly dynamic scheduling to optimize both the complexity and the success of load balancing. We also suggest the tuning of database schemata as a new anti-skew measure

Density-Aware Linear Algebra in a Column-Oriented In-Memory Database System

Linear algebra operations appear in nearly every application in advanced analytics, machine learning, and of various science domains. Until today, many data analysts and scientists tend to use statistics software packages or hand-crafted solutions for their analysis. In the era of data deluge, however, the external statistics packages and custom analysis programs that often run on single-workstations are incapable to keep up with the vast increase in data volume and size. In particular, there is an increasing demand of scientists for large scale data manipulation, orchestration, and advanced data management capabilities. These are among the key features of a mature relational database management system (DBMS). With the rise of main memory database systems, it now has become feasible to also consider applications that built up on linear algebra. This thesis presents a deep integration of linear algebra functionality into an in-memory column-oriented database system. In particular, this work shows that it has become feasible to execute linear algebra queries on large data sets directly in a DBMS-integrated engine (LAPEG), without the need of transferring data and being restricted by hard disc latencies. From various application examples that are cited in this work, we deduce a number of requirements that are relevant for a database system that includes linear algebra functionality. Beside the deep integration of matrices and numerical algorithms, these include optimization of expressions, transparent matrix handling, scalability and data-parallelism, and data manipulation capabilities. These requirements are addressed by our linear algebra engine. In particular, the core contributions of this thesis are: firstly, we show that the columnar storage layer of an in-memory DBMS yields an easy adoption of efficient sparse matrix data types and algorithms. Furthermore, we show that the execution of linear algebra expressions significantly benefits from different techniques that are inspired from database technology. In a novel way, we implemented several of these optimization strategies in LAPEG’s optimizer (SpMachO), which uses an advanced density estimation method (SpProdest) to predict the matrix density of intermediate results. Moreover, we present an adaptive matrix data type AT Matrix to obviate the need of scientists for selecting appropriate matrix representations. The tiled substructure of AT Matrix is exploited by our matrix multiplication to saturate the different sockets of a multicore main-memory platform, reaching up to a speed-up of 6x compared to alternative approaches. Finally, a major part of this thesis is devoted to the topic of data manipulation; where we propose a matrix manipulation API and present different mutable matrix types to enable fast insertions and deletes. We finally conclude that our linear algebra engine is well-suited to process dynamic, large matrix workloads in an optimized way. In particular, the DBMS-integrated LAPEG is filling the linear algebra gap, and makes columnar in-memory DBMS attractive as efficient, scalable ad-hoc analysis platform for scientists

Skew-Insensitive Join Processing in Shared-Disk Database Systems

Skew effects are still a significant problem for efficient query processing in parallel database systems. Especially in shared-nothing environments, this problem is aggravated by the substantial cost of data redistribution. Shared-disk systems, on the other hand, promise much higher flexibility in the distribution of workload among processing nodes because all input data can be accessed by any node at equal cost. In order to verify this potential for dynamic load balancing, we have devised a new technique for skew-tolerant join processing. In contrast to conventional solutions, our algorithm is not restricted to estimating processing costs in advance and assigning tasks to nodes accordingly. Instead, it monitors the actual progression of work and dynamically allocates tasks to processors, thus capitalizing on the uniform access pathlength in shared-disk architectures. This approach has the potential to alleviate not only any kind of data-inherent skew, but also execution skew caused by query- external workloads, by disk contention, or simply by inaccurate estimates used in predictive scheduling. We employ a detailed simulation system to evaluate the new algorithm under different types and degrees of skew

One Size Cannot Fit All: a Self-Adaptive Dispatcher for Skewed Hash Join in Shared-nothing RDBMSs

Shared-nothing architecture has been widely adopted in various commercial distributed RDBMSs. Thanks to the architecture, query can be processed in parallel and accelerated by scaling up the cluster horizontally on demand. In spite of that, load balancing has been a challenging issue in all distributed RDBMSs, including shared-nothing ones, which suffers much from skewed data distribution. In this work, we focus on one of the representative operator, namely Hash Join, and investigate how skewness among the nodes of a cluster will affect the load balance and eventual efficiency of an arbitrary query in shared-nothing RDBMSs. We found that existing Distributed Hash Join (Dist-HJ) solutions may not provide satisfactory performance when a value is skewed in both the probe and build tables. To address that, we propose a novel Dist-HJ solution, namely Partition and Replication (PnR). Although PnR provide the best efficiency in some skewness scenario, our exhaustive experiments over a group of shared-nothing RDBMSs show that there is not a single Dist-HJ solution that wins in all (data skew) scenarios. To this end, we further propose a self-adaptive Dist-HJ solution with a builtin sub-operator cost model that dynamically select the best Dist-HJ implementation strategy at runtime according to the data skew of the target query. We implement the solution in our commercial shared-nothing RDBMSs, namely KaiwuDB (former name ZNBase) and empirical study justifies that the self-adaptive model achieves the best performance comparing to a series of solution adopted in many existing RDBMSs

The Family of MapReduce and Large Scale Data Processing Systems

In the last two decades, the continuous increase of computational power has produced an overwhelming flow of data which has called for a paradigm shift in the computing architecture and large scale data processing mechanisms. MapReduce is a simple and powerful programming model that enables easy development of scalable parallel applications to process vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity machines. It isolates the application from the details of running a distributed program such as issues on data distribution, scheduling and fault tolerance. However, the original implementation of the MapReduce framework had some limitations that have been tackled by many research efforts in several followup works after its introduction. This article provides a comprehensive survey for a family of approaches and mechanisms of large scale data processing mechanisms that have been implemented based on the original idea of the MapReduce framework and are currently gaining a lot of momentum in both research and industrial communities. We also cover a set of introduced systems that have been implemented to provide declarative programming interfaces on top of the MapReduce framework. In addition, we review several large scale data processing systems that resemble some of the ideas of the MapReduce framework for different purposes and application scenarios. Finally, we discuss some of the future research directions for implementing the next generation of MapReduce-like solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1105.4252 by other author