Optimizing Performance of Aggregate Query Processing with Histogram Data Structure

In today's big data era, the capability of analyze massive data efficient and return the results within an short time limit is critical to decision making, thus many big data system proposed and various distributed and parallel processing techniques are heavily investigated. Among previous research, most of them are working on precise query processing, while approximate query processing (AQP) techniques which make interactive data exploration more efficiently and allows users to tradeoff between query accuracy and response time have not been investigate comprehensively. In this paper, we study the characteristics of aggregate query, a typical type of analytical query, and proposed an approximate query processing approach to optimize the execution of massive data based aggregate query with a histogram data structure. We implemented this approach into big data system Hive and compare it with Hive and AQP-enabled big data system BlinkDB, the experimental results verified that our approach is significantly fast than these existing systems in most scenarios.