Cache Conscious Data Layouting for In-Memory Databases

Many applications with manually implemented data management exhibit a data storage pattern in which semantically related data items are stored closer in memory than unrelated data items. The strong sematic relationship between these data items commonly induces contemporary accesses to them. This is called the principle of data locality and has been recognized by hardware vendors. It is commonly exploited to improve the performance of hardware. General Purpose Database Management Systems (DBMSs), whose main goal is to simplify optimal data storage and processing, generally fall short of this claim because the usage pattern of the stored data cannot be anticipated when designing the system. The current interest in column oriented databases indicates that one strategy does not fit all applications. A DBMS that automatically adapts it’s storage strategy to the workload of the database promises a significant performance increase by maximizing the benefit of hardware optimizations that are based on the principle of data locality. This thesis gives an overview of optimizations that are based on the principle of data locality and the effect they have on the data access performance of applications. Based on the findings, a model is introduced that allows an estimation of the costs of data accesses based on the arrangement of the data in the main memory. This model is evaluated through a series of experiments and incorporated into an automatic layouting component for a DBMS. This layouting component allows the calculation of an analytically optimal storage layout. The performance benefits brought by this component are evaluated in an application benchmark

Benchmarking NewSQL Database VoltDB

NewSQL is a type of relational database that is able to horizontally scale while retaining linearizable consistency. This is an improvement over a traditional SQL relational database because SQL databases cannot effectively scale across multiple machines. This is also an improvement over NoSQL databases because NewSQL databases are designed from the ground up to be consistent and have ACID guarantees. However, it should be noted that NewSQL databases are not a one size fits all type of database, each specific database is designed to perform well on specific workloads. This project will evaluate a NewSQL database, VoltDB, with a focus on its performance and consistency guarantees. VoltDB is a NewSQL type database that has a share-nothing distributed architecture and a lock-free concurrency method of maintaining consistency within the database. The shared-nothing distributed architecture ideally allows transactions to take place on a single machine, eliminating the need for consensus algorithms between multiple machines. The lock-free concurrency method employed removes the computational overhead needed to process transactions increasing the latency. To fully examine VoltDB, PyTPCC (a modified benchmark of TPC-C) was used to conduct a series of experiments. These experiments test VoltDB’s performance with horizontal scaling, vertical scaling, various numbers of clients, partition keys, multiple replicas, batch transactions, and, finally, how consistent it is after each test. The results of these experiments showed that VoltDB had the best performance when the transactions touched a small section of the data, and that it was always consistent

Cross-tier application and data partitioning of web applications for hybrid cloud deployment

Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of the public cloud and control over data resources provided at a private premise. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of complexity in distributing a system over these two locations. For multi-tier web applications, this challenge manifests itself primarily in the partitioning of application- and database-tiers. While there is existing research that focuses on either application-tier or data-tier partitioning, we show that optimized partitioning of web applications benefits from both tiers being considered simultaneously. We present our research on a new cross-tier partitioning approach to help developers make effective trade-offs between performance and cost in a hybrid cloud deployment. In two case studies the approach results in up to 54% reduction in monetary costs compared to a premise only deployment and 56% improvement in execution time compared to a naïve partitioning where application-tier is deployed in the cloud and data-tier is on private infrastructure

Flexibility in Data Management

With the ongoing expansion of information technology, new fields of application requiring data management emerge virtually every day. In our knowledge culture increasing amounts of data and work force organized in more creativity-oriented ways also radically change traditional fields of application and question established assumptions about data management. For instance, investigative analytics and agile software development move towards a very agile and flexible handling of data. As the primary facilitators of data management, database systems have to reflect and support these developments. However, traditional database management technology, in particular relational database systems, is built on assumptions of relatively stable application domains. The need to model all data up front in a prescriptive database schema earned relational database management systems the reputation among developers of being inflexible, dated, and cumbersome to work with. Nevertheless, relational systems still dominate the database market. They are a proven, standardized, and interoperable technology, well-known in IT departments with a work force of experienced and trained developers and administrators. This thesis aims at resolving the growing contradiction between the popularity and omnipresence of relational systems in companies and their increasingly bad reputation among developers. It adapts relational database technology towards more agility and flexibility. We envision a descriptive schema-comes-second relational database system, which is entity-oriented instead of schema-oriented; descriptive rather than prescriptive. The thesis provides four main contributions: (1)~a flexible relational data model, which frees relational data management from having a prescriptive schema; (2)~autonomous physical entity domains, which partition self-descriptive data according to their schema properties for better query performance; (3)~a freely adjustable storage engine, which allows adapting the physical data layout used to properties of the data and of the workload; and (4)~a self-managed indexing infrastructure, which autonomously collects and adapts index information under the presence of dynamic workloads and evolving schemas. The flexible relational data model is the thesis\' central contribution. It describes the functional appearance of the descriptive schema-comes-second relational database system. The other three contributions improve components in the architecture of database management systems to increase the query performance and the manageability of descriptive schema-comes-second relational database systems. We are confident that these four contributions can help paving the way to a more flexible future for relational database management technology

Join Execution Using Fragmented Columnar Indices on GPU and MIC

The paper describes an approach to the parallel natural join execution on computing clusters with GPU and MIC Coprocessors. This approach is based on a decomposition of natural join relational operator using the column indices and domain-interval fragmentation. This decomposition admits parallel executing the resource-intensive relational operators without data transfers. All column index fragments are stored in main memory. To process the join of two relations, each pair of index fragments corresponding to particular domain interval is joined on a separate processor core. Described approach allows efficient parallel query processing for very large databases on modern computing cluster systems with many-core accelerators. A prototype of the DBMS coprocessor system was implemented using this technique. The results of computational experiments for GPU and Xeon Phi are presented. These results confirm the efficiency of proposed approach

Flexibility in Data Management

With the ongoing expansion of information technology, new fields of application requiring data management emerge virtually every day. In our knowledge culture increasing amounts of data and work force organized in more creativity-oriented ways also radically change traditional fields of application and question established assumptions about data management. For instance, investigative analytics and agile software development move towards a very agile and flexible handling of data. As the primary facilitators of data management, database systems have to reflect and support these developments. However, traditional database management technology, in particular relational database systems, is built on assumptions of relatively stable application domains. The need to model all data up front in a prescriptive database schema earned relational database management systems the reputation among developers of being inflexible, dated, and cumbersome to work with. Nevertheless, relational systems still dominate the database market. They are a proven, standardized, and interoperable technology, well-known in IT departments with a work force of experienced and trained developers and administrators. This thesis aims at resolving the growing contradiction between the popularity and omnipresence of relational systems in companies and their increasingly bad reputation among developers. It adapts relational database technology towards more agility and flexibility. We envision a descriptive schema-comes-second relational database system, which is entity-oriented instead of schema-oriented; descriptive rather than prescriptive. The thesis provides four main contributions: (1)~a flexible relational data model, which frees relational data management from having a prescriptive schema; (2)~autonomous physical entity domains, which partition self-descriptive data according to their schema properties for better query performance; (3)~a freely adjustable storage engine, which allows adapting the physical data layout used to properties of the data and of the workload; and (4)~a self-managed indexing infrastructure, which autonomously collects and adapts index information under the presence of dynamic workloads and evolving schemas. The flexible relational data model is the thesis\' central contribution. It describes the functional appearance of the descriptive schema-comes-second relational database system. The other three contributions improve components in the architecture of database management systems to increase the query performance and the manageability of descriptive schema-comes-second relational database systems. We are confident that these four contributions can help paving the way to a more flexible future for relational database management technology

Relational Database Design and Multi-Objective Database Queries for Position Navigation and Timing Data

Performing flight tests is a natural part of researching cutting edge sensors and filters for sensor integration. Unfortunately, tests are expensive, and typically take many months of planning. A sensible goal would be to make previously collected data readily available to researchers for future development. The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) has hundreds of data logs potentially available to aid in facilitating further research in the area of navigation. A database would provide a common location where older and newer data sets are available. Such a database must be able to store the sensor data, metadata about the sensors, and affiliated metadata of interest. This thesis proposes a standard approach for sensor and metadata schema and three different design approaches that organize this data in relational databases. Queries proposed by members of the Autonomy and Navigation Technology (ANT) Center at AFIT are the foundation of experiments for testing. These tests fall into two categories, downloaded data, and queries which return a list of missions. Test databases of 100 and 1000 missions are created for the three design approaches to simulate AFIT\u27s present and future volume of data logs. After testing, this thesis recommends one specific approach to the ANT Center as its database solution. In order to enable more complex queries, a Genetic algorithm and Hill Climber algorithm are developed as solutions to queries in the combined Knapsack/Set Covering Problem Domains. These algorithms are tested against the two test databases for the recommended database approach. Each algorithm returned solutions in under two minutes, and may be a valuable tool for researchers when the database becomes operational

Database Principles and Technologies – Based on Huawei GaussDB

This open access book contains eight chapters that deal with database technologies, including the development history of database, database fundamentals, introduction to SQL syntax, classification of SQL syntax, database security fundamentals, database development environment, database design fundamentals, and the application of Huawei’s cloud database product GaussDB database. This book can be used as a textbook for database courses in colleges and universities, and is also suitable as a reference book for the HCIA-GaussDB V1.5 certification examination. The Huawei GaussDB (for MySQL) used in the book is a Huawei cloud-based high-performance, highly applicable relational database that fully supports the syntax and functionality of the open source database MySQL. All the experiments in this book can be run on this database platform. As the world’s leading provider of ICT (information and communication technology) infrastructure and smart terminals, Huawei’s products range from digital data communication, cyber security, wireless technology, data storage, cloud computing, and smart computing to artificial intelligence

Optimal column layout for hybrid workloads

Data-intensive analytical applications need to support both efficient reads and writes. However, what is usually a good data layout for an update-heavy workload, is not well-suited for a read-mostly one and vice versa. Modern analytical data systems rely on columnar layouts and employ delta stores to inject new data and updates. We show that for hybrid workloads we can achieve close to one order of magnitude better performance by tailoring the column layout design to the data and query workload. Our approach navigates the possible design space of the physical layout: it organizes each column’s data by determining the number of partitions, their corresponding sizes and ranges, and the amount of buffer space and how it is allocated. We frame these design decisions as an optimization problem that, given workload knowledge and performance requirements, provides an optimal physical layout for the workload at hand. To evaluate this work, we build an in-memory storage engine, Casper, and we show that it outperforms state-of-the-art data layouts of analytical systems for hybrid workloads. Casper delivers up to 2.32x higher throughput for update-intensive workloads and up to 2.14x higher throughput for hybrid workloads. We further show how to make data layout decisions robust to workload variation by carefully selecting the input of the optimization.http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol12/p2393-athanassoulis.pdfPublished versionPublished versio