ATraPos: Adaptive Transaction Processing on Hardware Islands

Nowadays, high-performance transaction processing applications increasingly run on multisocket multicore servers. Such architectures exhibit non-uniform memory access latency as well as non-uniform thread communication costs. Unfortunately, traditional shared-everything database management systems are designed for uniform inter-core communication speeds. This causes unpredictable access latencies in the critical path. While lack of data locality may be a minor nuisance on systems with fewer than 4 processors, it becomes a serious scalability limitation on larger systems due to accesses to centralized data structures. In this paper, we propose ATraPos. a storage manager design that is aware of the non-uniform access latencies of multisocket systems. ATraPos achieves good data locality by carefully partitioning the data as well as internal data structures (e.g., state information) to the available processors and by assigning threads to specific partitions. Furthermore, ATraPos dynamically adapts to the workload characteristics, i.e., when the workload changes, ATraPos detects the change and automatically revises the data partitioning and thread placement to fit the current access patterns and hardware topology. We prototype ATraPos on top of an open-source storage manager Shore-MT and we present a detailed experimental analysis with both synthetic and standard (TPC-C and TATP) benchmarks. We show that ATraPos exhibits performance improvements of a factor ranging from 1.4 to 6.7x for a wide collection of transactional workloads. In addition, we show that the adaptive monitoring and partitioning scheme of ATraPos poses a negligible cost, while it allows the system to dynamically and gracefully adapt when the workload changes.

Scalable and Dynamically Balanced Shared-Everything OLTP with Physiological Partitioning

Anastasia Ailamaki, Frederick Ryan Johnson, Ippokratis Pandis, Pinar Tözün

Scaling the performance of shared-everything transaction processing systems to highly-parallel multicore hardware remains a challenge for database system designers. Recent proposals alleviate locking and logging bottlenecks in the system, leaving page latching as the next potential problem. To tackle the page latching problem, we propose physiological partitioning (PLP). The PLP design applies logical-only partitioning, maintaining the desired properties of shared-everything designs, and introduces a multi-rooted B+Tree index structure (MRBTree) which enables the partitioning of the accesses at the physical page level. Logical partitioning and MRBTrees together ensure that all accesses to a given index page come from a single thread and, hence, can be entirely latch-free; an extended design makes heap page accesses thread-private as well. Eliminating page latching allows us to simplify key code paths in the system such as B+Tree operations leading to more efficient and maintainable code. Profiling a prototype PLP system running on different multicore machines shows that it acquires 85% and 68% fewer contentious critical sections, respectively, than an optimized conventional design and one based on logical-only partitioning. PLP also improves performance up to 40% and 18%, respectively, over the existing systems. Although partitioning is an increasingly popular solution for scaling up the performance of database management systems even within a single (multicore or multisocket) machine, it is not the panacea since there are many challenges associated with it. Therefore, in this paper, we also focus on one of the most troublesome challenges for partitioning-based transaction processing systems, which is their behavior in skewed and dynamically changing workloads. We present experimental results that show the non-optimal performance of a PLP transaction processing system and discuss challenges toward robust and efficient dynamic load balancing mechanisms for such systems. Then, we propose a dynamic load balancing mechanism and integrate it with our PLP system. Evaluation results show that the overhead of the mechanism is low in normal operation (in the worst case at most 8%) and it enhances the system with robust behavior, while achieving very low response times in both detecting and handling load imbalances.

2013

Adaptive Query Processing on RAW Data

Anastasia Ailamaki, Ioannis Alagiannis, Miguel Sérgio De Oliveira Branco, Manolis Karpathiotakis

Database systems deliver impressive performance for large classes of workloads as the result of decades of research into optimizing database engines. High performance, however, is achieved at the cost of versatility. In particular, database systems only operate efficiently over loaded data, i.e., data converted from its original raw format into the system’s internal data format. At the same time, data volume continues to increase exponentially and data varies increasingly, with an escalating number of new formats. The consequence is a growing impedance mismatch between the original structures holding the data in the raw files and the structures used by query engines for efficient processing. In an ideal scenario, the query engine would seamlessly adapt itself to the data and ensure efficient query processing regardless of the input data formats, optimizing itself to each instance of a file and of a query by leveraging information available at query time. Today’s systems, however, force data to adapt to the query engine during data loading. This paper proposes adapting the query engine to the formats of raw data. It presents RAW, a prototype query engine which enables querying heterogeneous data sources transparently. RAW employs Just-In-Time access paths, which efficiently couple heterogeneous raw files to the query engine and reduce the overhead of traditional general-purpose scan operators. There are, however, inherent overheads with accessing raw data directly that cannot be eliminated, such as converting the raw values. Therefore, RAW also uses column shreds, ensuring that we pay these costs only for the subsets of raw data strictly needed by a query. We use RAW in a real-world scenario and achieve a two-order of magnitude speedup against the existing hand-written solution.

2014

Exploitation de connaissances sémantiques externes dans les représentations vectorielles en recherche documentaire

Florian Seydoux

The work presented in this thesis deals with several problems met in information retrieval (IR), task which one can summarise as identifying, in a collection of "documents", a subset of documents carrying a sought information, i.e.. relevant for a request expressed by a user. In the case of textual documents, to which we limited ourselves within the framework of this thesis, a significant part of the difficulty lies in ambiguity inherent to human languages. The interaction with the user is also approached in our work, by studying a tool enabling a natural language access to a database. Finally, some techniques which permit the visualisation of large collections of documents are also presented. In this document we first of all describe the principal models of IR by highlighting the relations which exist with some manual technics of IR and document retrieval, developed during the past centuries. We present the principle of document indexing, allowing us to represent documents in a multidimensional space, and the use of this representation by a vectorial model. After having reviewed the principal improvements made these last years with vectorial research systems, including the preprocessings of collections, the indexing mechanism and measurements of similarities between documents, we detail some recent usecases of additional semantic resources (semantic dictionaries, thesaurus, networks, ontologies) reported in scientific literature for the indexing task. We then present more in detail the semantic indexing principle of textual documents by using a thesaurus, consisting in integrating in the document's representation space at least part of the informational contents of hierarchical semantic resources. We propose a general framework allowing us to describe and position various possible techniques to carry out the semantic indexing by adapting, if possible, the specificity of the descriptions resulting from the semantic resources to the data to be represented. We use this framework to describe three families of criteria usable for semantic indexing, each one having its own characteristics. For each of these families, we give the specific algorithms allowing the computation of the criteria. The first two families allow us to consider several criteria already known in feature selection. Moreover we show that, unfortunately, many of these criteria are in fact not very effective for the considered task. The third family allows us to introduce a completely new criterion, the Minimum Redundancy Cut criterion (MRC), built on the basis of the information theory and allowing us to obtain index terms having a probability of occurrence in the collection of documents as well balanced as possible. Finally, we treat the case of semantic index independent of the data (statically choosen), allowing a parameterisation of the level of generality of the index terms. Some of the criteria suggested for semantic indexing has been empirically evaluated. To judge their relevance, we used a well known vectorial system (the Smart IR system) and measured the performances of IR obtained with various reference collections. Those collections was indexed on the basis of the studied criterion, by taking into account the strongly structuring semantic relation of hyper/hyponymy ("is-a" relation), given by two different semantic resources. By comparing results obtained with the performances of a traditional indexing (using the lemmas of the words as representation space), we can show on one hand the relevance of the semantic indexings (in RD) and on the other hand the quality of the proposed criterion (MRC). Concerning man-machine interaction, we present a general outline allowing to build in a relatively fast and systematic way systems with mixed initiative, giving the human user a large (and natural) latitude in the control of the dialogue. This outline is usable in typical database research-task applications (where the database is hidden to the user, but the latter knows exactly which information they wish to find) as well as advice-task applications, for which the users does not necessarily have a precise idea of their needs, and uses the system not only for specifing their wishes, but also a set of propositions as a final result. We particularly stress the techniques allowing us to obtain a robust system, able to deal with speech recognizer failures. Concerning the visualisation of large textual data collections, we present an application of the correspondences analysis (allowing to highlight similarities and oppositions for various groups of entity, built on the basis of additional features present in the DB) to the case of patents data. In addition, we propose a method (based on the bootstrap replication principle) allowing us to determine a confidence interval for relative positionings of various groups, thus permit to immediately judge the reliability of the visually apparent similarities or oppositions.