Analyzing large scale data has emerged as an important activity for many
organizations in the past few years. This large scale data analysis is
facilitated by the MapReduce programming and execution model and its
implementations, most notably Hadoop. Users of MapReduce often have analysis
tasks that are too complex to express as individual MapReduce jobs. Instead,
they use high-level query languages such as Pig, Hive, or Jaql to express their
complex tasks. The compilers of these languages translate queries into
workflows of MapReduce jobs. Each job in these workflows reads its input from
the distributed file system used by the MapReduce system and produces output
that is stored in this distributed file system and read as input by the next
job in the workflow. The current practice is to delete these intermediate
results from the distributed file system at the end of executing the workflow.
One way to improve the performance of workflows of MapReduce jobs is to keep
these intermediate results and reuse them for future workflows submitted to the
system. In this paper, we present ReStore, a system that manages the storage
and reuse of such intermediate results. ReStore can reuse the output of whole
MapReduce jobs that are part of a workflow, and it can also create additional
reuse opportunities by materializing and storing the output of query execution
operators that are executed within a MapReduce job. We have implemented ReStore
as an extension to the Pig dataflow system on top of Hadoop, and we
experimentally demonstrate significant speedups on queries from the PigMix
benchmark.Comment: VLDB201